FABRIQ Terminology

Before I can get into explaining how the FABRIQ works and how to configure it, I need to explain a bit of the terminology we use:

• A network is the FABRIQ term that's rougly equivalent to an "application". A network consists of an arbitrary number of network-distributed nodes that are running inside the scope of the network. The network creates a common namespace for all of these nodes. Networks are configured using a single XML configuration document that is submitted (or routed via another network) to all hosts that shall host the network's nodes.
• A node is the FABRIQ term that is roughly equivalent to a "service" or "component". A node is the smallest addressable unit. Every node has a "relative node URI" that is composed of the network name and the node's own name into {network/node}. This relative node URI can be composed with absolute, transport dependent URIs such as http://server/vdir/network/node or msmq://machine/queuename/network/node. Within a network, the runtime is also capable of resolving logical addresses of the form fabriq://network/node and automatically map them to physical addresses. At runtime, a node accepts messages and dispatches them into one of one or more action pipelines. Each node may be guarded by a set of WS-Policy assertions, including Kerberos and X.509 cert authentication and authorization claims. A node may be hosted on a dedicated machine, one a well defined set of machines or on "any" machine within a cluster.
• An action pipeline is a pipeline that is associated with an action identifier and is roughly equivalent to a "method". An action identifier is a URI as per WS-Addressing's definition of wsa:Action and is mapped to SOAPAction: whenever we go through HTTP. A node must host at least one action pipeline with no limit on the number of action pipelines it can support. An action may declare a set of message schema-types that it understands and those message definitions may be used for validation inbound messages. An action has one or more outbound message routes that are matched against the result message action or destination. Multiple routes may match a message, which causes the message flow to fork. For each route exist one or multiple prioritized routing destinations. If multiple destinations have the same priority, the engine will balance calls across those, otherwise the engine will use the ones with lower priority as backup routes. At the end of each action pipeline is a sender port that sends resulting messages out to their destinations, which may be other FABRIQ nodes or any other external endpoint that understands the respective one-way message being sent.
• A pipeline is a composition of a sequence of handlers or nested pipelines. Pipelines can be nested in arbitrary depth. Pipelines are strictly unidirectional message processors that have no concept of a "response" on the same thread analogous to a return value (hence all actions are one-way only). A pipeline may or may not be based on a predefinable pipeline-type. Pipeline-types allow the definition of reusable pipelines that can be reused within the same network or (via import) in multiple networks.
• A handler refers to a software component (a CLR class) implementing a set of interfaces that allow it to be composed into and hosted in a pipeline. Handlers should be designed to perform only very primitive operations that can then be composed into pipelines to implement specific functionality. Built-in handlers include a content-based routing handler and an XSLT transformation handler. Custom handlers may contain any type of logic. A handler receives messages and may consume them, evaluate and annotate them and yield any number of resulting messages. The definition of a handler embeds an XML fragment that allows the handler to configure itself. The actual reference to the CLR class implementing the handler is defined in a handler-type.
• A handler-type associates a CLR class with a name that can be used to define handlers within a configuration file. It also allows the declaration of a code-base URL for the CLR class. This feature allows the installation of "virgin" FABRIQ runtimes in a cluster and have the runtimes auto-download all the required code for hosting a node from a central code store and therefore dramatically eases deployment and dynamic reconfiguration of a FABRIQ cluster.

In the next couple of postings I will map these terms to concrete config files.

The interesting bit about config is that FABRIQ's configuration mechanism uses the FABRIQ itself. FABRIQ has a predefined (extensible, configurable) network "fabriq" with a node "configuration" that currently defines a single action "configure". The pipeline for that action consists of a single handler (the FabriqConfigurationHandler) and that expects and accepts the configuration files I'll describe over the next days as the body of a message. With that, the configuration mechanism can be secured with policy, or can be embedded into a larger network that does preprocessing or even performs automatic assembly of configuration, or that automatically distributes configuration from a single point across a large cluster of machines.

To be continued ...