This year, Gluggagægir has been assigned to the Trendy Toy Assembly Line. His mission? To set up a system to track the inventory of each type of toy. His parameters? Make it light on infrastructure, make it such that every change is auditable, and make it as easy as possible to interact with by the main Elf IT division.

Knowing that his old IT division buddies are all command line junkies, Glugg decided to try something different: GitStore. GitStore is a module that turns a Git repository into a datastore, and it comes with a MooseX::Storage driver that turns it into a persistent object repository. Glugg rationalized that Git repositories are as light on the infrastructure as anything would ever be, are a pretty much the ultimate tool to keep track of change history, and could make his IT friends real happy if he was to choose the right object serialization format.

So Glugg went to work. Meaning: he poured himself a stiff egg nog mug and created a Toy class:

package Toy;

use strict;
use warnings;

use Moose;
use MooseX::Storage;

with Storage( format => 'JSON', io => 'GitStore');

has name => (
    isa      => 'Str',
    is       => 'ro',
    required => 1,
);

has quantity => (
    traits  => [ 'Counter' ],
    isa     => 'Int',
    is      => 'rw',
    default => 0,
    handles => { built => 'inc' },
);

has wishlist => (
    traits  => [ 'Array' ],
    isa     => 'ArrayRef[Str]',
    default => sub { [] },
    handles => {
        add_wishlist => 'push',
        all_children => 'elements',
        nbr_children => 'count',
    },
);

sub status {
    my $self = shift;

    print $self->name, ": ";

    my $surplus = $self->quantity - $self->nbr_children;

    if ( $surplus >= 0 ) {
        print "all is good, surplus of $surplus toys.\n"
    }
    else {
        $surplus *= -1;
        print "ALERT, $surplus children in danger to be disappointed\n";
    }
}

# always save before going out of context
sub DEMOLISH { $_[0]->store( $_[0]->name ) }

1;

Once this was done, he created an empty git repository in ~ttal/toystore, and asked the department team lead to fill it with the trendy toys of this year:

use Toy;

my $toystore = '/users/ttal/toystore';

Toy->new( name => $_, git_repo => $toystore ) for qw/
    my_pretty_platypus
    heckle_me_groucho
    star_peace_inaction_figure
/;

With the toys created, the rest of the department could now get busy. Half the elves would update the inventory, and the other half would keep track of which children requested those particular toys. All of this done by a fairly complex process, but fortunately using a very simple API to the store:

# increase the inventories
Toy->load( 'my_pretty_platypus', git_repo => $toystore )->built(2);
Toy->load( 'heckle_me_groucho', git_repo => $toystore  )->built(3);
Toy->load( 'star_peace_inaction_figure', 
           git_repo => $toystore                       )->built(1);

# update the wishlists
Toy->load( 'my_pretty_platypus', git_repo => $toystore)
   ->add_wishlist('rjbs', 'toby', 'yanick');
Toy->load( 'heckle_me_groucho', git_repo => $toystore )
   ->add_wishlist('arthur');
Toy->load( 'star_peace_inaction_figure', git_repo => $toystore)
   ->add_wishlist('david');

With that very simple system, Glugg had the audit feature requested by the bosses. Not in a super dainty way, mind you, but serviceable:

$ git log my_pretty_platypus    
commit 3a89e96455f5704fd58b8ed786374998a1533d5d
Author: anonymous <anon@127.0.0.1>
Date:   Sun Dec 8 20:52:58 2013 +0000

diff --git a/my_pretty_platypus b/my_pretty_platypus
index 111111..222222 100644
--- a/my_pretty_platypus
+++ b/my_pretty_platypus
@@ -1 +1 @@
-{"__CLASS__":"Toy","quantity":2,"name":"my_pretty_platypus","wishlist":[]}
+{"__CLASS__":"Toy","quantity":2,"name":"my_pretty_platypus","wishlist":["rjbs","toby","yanick"]}

commit a3caacde128a24a79898dabd0afcbf4556f021b0
Author: anonymous <anon@127.0.0.1>
Date:   Sun Dec 8 20:52:58 2013 +0000

diff --git a/my_pretty_platypus b/my_pretty_platypus
index 222222..333333 100644
--- a/my_pretty_platypus
+++ b/my_pretty_platypus
@@ -1 +1 @@
-{"__CLASS__":"Toy","quantity":0,"name":"my_pretty_platypus","wishlist":[]}
+{"__CLASS__":"Toy","quantity":2,"name":"my_pretty_platypus","wishlist":[]}

commit abc3f329823980464f67126b7e0afaeaeffe2101
Author: anonymous <anon@127.0.0.1>
Date:   Sun Dec 8 20:52:58 2013 +0000

diff --git a/my_pretty_platypus b/my_pretty_platypus
index 333333..444444 100644
--- a/my_pretty_platypus
+++ b/my_pretty_platypus
@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+{"__CLASS__":"Toy","quantity":0,"name":"my_pretty_platypus","wishlist":[]}

And while the store was, of course, easily accessible via scripts to generate reports and whatnots:

use GitStore;

my $gitstore = GitStore->new($toystore);

for my $toy ( $gitstore->list ) {
    Toy->load( $toy, git_repo => $toystore )->status;
}

__END__
will print:

heckle_me_groucho: all is good, surplus of 2 toys.
my_pretty_platypus: ALERT, 1 children in danger to be disappointed
star_peace_inaction_figure: all is good, surplus of 0 toys.

It was also easily mungeable via other means. For example, some IT elves partial to the fish shell and to App::jt got in the habit of getting the current toy tallies via:

$ cd ~ttal/toystore
$ for toy in *; cat $toy | jt --fields name,quantity; end;
{
"quantity" : 3,
"name" : "heckle_me_groucho"
}
{
"quantity" : 2,
"name" : "my_pretty_platypus"
}
{
"quantity" : 1,
"name" : "star_peace_inaction_figure"
}

All in all, Glugg was pretty smug about his system. And with the TTAL department happily churning away, he was able to return to his pet project — a skunkwork initiative aimed at leveraging Big Data technologies in a fashion that would revolutionalize the way the North Pole was processing children. But this story, dear boys and dear girls, is a story for another night...

See Also

• GitStore

• MooseX::Storage

• App::jt