Msg-fabric-core NPM

msg-fabric-core

msg-fabric-core is a uniform messaging API for writing distributed (network) actors.

In a browser environment, use msg-fabric-core to communicate in the main context, an IFrame, a Web Worker, over an RTCDataChannel, or over a WebSocket.

In a NodeJS environment, communciate over TCP, TLS, duplex Streams, WebSockets, or use a plugin to bridge over NATS or MQTT.

Sent packets are synchronously cloned, thereby preventing accidental mutation. Furthermore, packets are only encoded to bytes when needed to transmit across a stream-oriented connection — WebSocket, RTCDataChannel, TCP/TLS, or similar stream.

A collection of ES6 modules are published for both NodeJS and Web platforms, as well as all the core plugins, to allow crafting a build including only is required to solve the problem at hand.

Inspired by:

Alan Kay's vision of messaging between objects in Smalltalk
Erlang's distributed messaging
Uber's Ringpop and TChannel
PouchDB's excellent plugin model

Documentation

See reference docs and examples

Examples

import MsgFabric from 'msg-fabric-core' 
const hub = MsgFabric.create()

Add a Target

const tgt_addr = hub.local.addTarget(null, pkt => {
  console.log('pkt target received pkt:', pkt)

  if (pkt.body.id_reply) {
    console.log('replying to:', pkt.body.id_reply)
    hub.send( pkt.body.id_reply, { ts: new Date, echo: pkt.body })
  }
})

Send a message and await a reply

const reply = hub.local.addOnce()
hub.send(tgt_addr,
  { msg: 'hello readme example with reply',
    id_reply: reply.id
  })

let ans = await reply.promise
console.log('Received reply', ans)