At work we recently built an HTML5 & JavaScript hosting service that pulls files from GitHub. Of course, we managed to release this feature smack in the middle of GitHub’s recent DDOS woes.

Because GitHub’s outages were intermittent and other parts of our functionality worked, we wanted some way of letting our users know if we couldn’t reach GitHub. The outages sometimes manifested themselves as a timeout rather than a returned error, so I didn’t want to block the entire UI from loading while I waited to see if a request to GitHub would terminate or not. I was starting to look at Lift’s powerful Comet support when the lovely and helpful dpp (who we are lucky enough to share an office with!) suggested that I look at lazy_load.

The slightly tricky part was catching timeouts before lazy_load’s default 2 minute timeout period ends. I was able to do that by tinkering with the Apache HTTPClient that is wrapped by the Dispatch library.

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import xml.NodeSeq
import org.apache.http.params.HttpConnectionParams
import org.apache.http.conn.ConnectTimeoutException
import net.liftweb.common._
import dispatch._

def ping(xhtml : NodeSeq) : NodeSeq = {
  val connectionTimeoutMillis = 10000;
  val socketTimeoutMillis = 10000;
  val http = new Http with thread.Safety
  val httpParams = http.client.getParams
  HttpConnectionParams.setConnectionTimeout(httpParams, connectionTimeoutMillis);
  HttpConnectionParams.setSoTimeout(httpParams, socketTimeoutMillis);

  val gitHubReq = url("https://api.github.com/user/repos") <<? Map("access_token" -> gitHubAccessToken)

  val pingResult = try {
    http x(gitHubReq as_str) {
      case (200, _, _, out) => Full(out())
      case (error, _, _, out) => Failure("GitHub HTTP request failed with error code " + error + ": " + out());
    }
  } catch {
    case e: ConnectTimeoutException => Failure("GitHub HTTP request timed out")
  } finally {
    http.shutdown()
  }

  (pingResult failMsg "GitHub HTTP request returned empty") match {
    case Failure(msg, _, _) => log(msg); <span class="error">We're currently having trouble connecting to GitHub (<a href="https://status.github.com/">status</a>). Parts of this page might not work right now.<br /><br /></span>
    case _ => NodeSeq.Empty
  }
}

Surrounding a template call to this method with lift:lazy-load causes it to load in the background after the rest of the page loads. One minor wrinkle is that lazy-load displays a spinning indicator by default; you can override this behavior with the template attribute. Since I didn’t want anything to be displayed unless there was a problem, I created an empty.html template that just contains a <span/>.

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<lift:lazy-load template="empty">
  <lift:GitHub.ping />
</lift:lazy-load>

Unexpected side effect of this code: now any time I go to pull a repo or start a build and GitHub is down, I’m super excited to go to my page and see the warning working.