ProtoComm — bi-directional RPC + events microframework

Status: work-in-progress, use at your own risk.

Facilitates transparent bi-directional communication between services. Works in Node.js and Browser (over WebSocket).

Features

• shared message and service definitions in JSON Schema format
• transparent access: clients just invoke methods and subscribe to events as if the service was a class within the same process/runtime
• transport is abstracted away from business logic
• no reliance on code generation (unlike Protobuf toolset)
• transport-agnostic; built for WebSockets in mind, but can work with IPC, TCP (albeit custom framing required)

How to use

Let's use Chat Service from tests as a motivational example.

• ChatServiceDef is a service definition which is shared across Server and Client
• On server side, ChatSession implements ChatServiceDef interface per connected client.
• On client side, ServiceClient creates a stub using the shared service def. Conceptually, each client "talks" to its session.
• Finally, on server side ChatServer sets up the WebSocket server, hooks it up with the transport and creates a service registry.
• The tests demonstrate how messages are delivered both in RPC style (response delivered to the client who sent the request) and in Event-driven style.