TL;DR

We will take a closer look at the implementation for the in-memory key/value store in xmpl. This post is part of a series.

In previous post xmpl - the key/value API we gave a quick look at the interface for the key/value store object that is used by the API endpoints to actually store the key/value pairs:

• as_hash(): return the whole key/value store as a hash with key/value pairs;
• get($key): get the value associated to a key;
• has($key): check if the store has a given key;
• is_healthy(): return a boolean result depending on whether the object considers to be in a healthy state or not;
• new(@args): the constructor;
• origin: what is the actual backend for the key/value store (e.g. memory, file, remote URL, …);
• remove($key): remove a given key/value pair;
• set($key, $value): set the provided value associated to the provided key.

Here we go with the implementation of this interface for the in-memory store:

package KVStore::InMemory {
   sub as_hash ($self) { return {$self->%*} }
   sub get ($s, $k) { return $s->{$k} if exists $s->{$k}; die "unknown\n" }
   sub has ($self, $key) { return exists $self->{$key} }
   sub is_healthy { return 1 }
   sub new ($package, $kvps = {}) { return bless {$kvps->%*}, $package }
   sub origin ($self) { return '<memory>' }
   sub remove ($self, $key) { delete $self->{$key}; return $self }
   sub set ($self, $key, $value) { $self->{$key} = $value; return $self }
}

I have to admit that this is the first time I use this way of declaring a package with the scoping restricted to a block, but I like the idea very much.

The basic idea in this initial key/value store is that we just provide a wrapper around THE key/value store in Perl: a hash. Hence, it’s easy to see that in as_hash we just provide a copy of the key/value pairs in our hash, that has maps to exists, and so on.

As it’s living in memory, we always consider instances of this class to be healthy, so we’re consistently returning 1 to flag that everything is OK.

Last, origin is set to <memory> because… the hash lives in memory, right?