workr v1.0.2

workr

The purpose of this module is to make manager to worker process communication easy and to avoid pitfalls. It uses remote procedure style calls and event propagation.

Methods

The main pitfall to avoid is that of the worker managing the manager. The worker should not call methods in the manager process, which would create a hard to manage dependency. Instead, this module lets you define methods on the worker that the manager can call using a worker handle which can return a response to the manager.

Events

Things may occur on the worker that the manager should be able to be notified by. Here is where events come in. The worker can emit an event, which the manager can listen for on the worker handle. The worker handle inherits from EventEmitter2 so that you can use namespaces and wildcards when registering your event handlers.

Usage

See tests for additional examples of how to implement the managing process and the file ./test/assets/test_worker.js for methods definitions and event propagation.

Worker

The method done(...returnValues) is used to return zero or more responses to the managing process when finished.

var Worker = require("workr").Worker;
var worker = new Worker();

worker.emit('test', 'Hello world!');

worker.define('square', function (x, done) {
  done(x * x);
});

worker.define('add', function (a, b, done) {
  done(a + b);
});

Worker handle

A worker handle is returned when creating a new worker in the managing process. It can be used to call methods in the worker and listen for events.

var Handle = require("workr").Handle

var worker = new Handle(workerFilePath);

worker.on('test', function (data) {
  assert.equal('Hello world!', data);
});

worker.call('square', 5).response(function (result) {
  assert.equal(25, result);
});

worker.call('add', "Hello ", "world!").response(function (result) {
  assert.equal("Hello world!", result);
});