Axon
Axon is a message-oriented socket library for node.js heavily inspired by zeromq.
Installation
$ npm install axon
Features
- message oriented
- automated reconnection
- light-weight wire protocol
- supports arbitrary binary message (msgpack, json, BLOBS, etc)
- supports JSON messages out of the box
- fast (~800 mb/s ~500,000 messages/s)
Events
close
when server or connection is closederror
(err) when an-handled socket error occursignored error
(err) when an axon-handled socket error occurs, but is ignoredsocket error
(err) emitted regardless of handling, for logging purposesreconnect attempt
when a reconnection attempt is madeconnect
when connected to the peer, or a peer connection is accepteddisconnect
when an accepted peer disconnectsbind
when the server is bound
Patterns
- push / pull
- pub / sub
- req / rep
- pub-emitter / sub-emitter
Push / Pull
PushSocket
s distribute messages round-robin:
var axon = require('axon')
, sock = axon.socket('push');
sock.bind(3000);
console.log('push server started');
setInterval(function(){
sock.send('hello');
}, 150);
Receiver of PushSocket
messages:
var axon = require('axon')
, sock = axon.socket('pull');
sock.connect(3000);
sock.on('message', function(msg){
console.log(msg.toString());
});
Both PushSocket
s and PullSocket
s may .bind()
or .connect()
. In the
following configuration the push socket is bound and pull "workers" connect
to it to receive work:
This configuration shows the inverse, where workers connect to a "sink"
to push results:
Pub / Sub
PubSocket
s send messages to all subscribers without queueing. This is an
important difference when compared to a PushSocket
, where the delivery of
messages will be queued during disconnects and sent again upon the next connection.
var axon = require('axon')
, sock = axon.socket('pub');
sock.bind(3000);
console.log('pub server started');
setInterval(function(){
sock.send('hello');
}, 500);
SubSocket
simply receives any messages from a PubSocket
:
var axon = require('axon')
, sock = axon.socket('sub');
sock.connect(3000);
sock.on('message', function(msg){
console.log(msg.toString());
});
SubSocket
s may optionally .subscribe()
to one or more "topics" (the first multipart value),
using string patterns or regular expressions:
var axon = require('axon')
, sock = axon.socket('sub');
sock.connect(3000);
sock.subscribe('user:login');
sock.subscribe('upload:*:progress');
sock.on('message', function(topic, msg){
});
Req / Rep
ReqSocket
is similar to a PushSocket
in that it round-robins messages
to connected RepSocket
s, however it differs in that this communication is
bi-directional, every req.send()
must provide a callback which is invoked
when the RepSocket
replies.
var axon = require('axon')
, sock = axon.socket('req');
sock.bind(3000);
sock.send(img, function(res){
});
RepSocket
s receive a reply
callback that is used to respond to the request,
you may have several of these nodes.
var axon = require('axon')
, sock = axon.socket('rep');
sock.connect(3000);
sock.on('message', function(img, reply){
reply(img);
});
Like other sockets you may provide multiple arguments or an array of arguments,
followed by the callbacks. For example here we provide a task name of "resize"
to facilitate multiple tasks over a single socket:
var axon = require('axon')
, sock = axon.socket('req');
sock.bind(3000);
sock.send('resize', img, function(res){
});
Respond to the "resize" task:
var axon = require('axon')
, sock = axon.socket('rep');
sock.connect(3000);
sock.on('message', function(task, img, reply){
switch (task.toString()) {
case 'resize':
reply(img);
break;
}
});
PubEmitter / SubEmitter
PubEmitter
and SubEmitter
are higher-level Pub
/ Sub
sockets, using the "json" codec to behave much like node's EventEmitter
. When a SubEmitter
's .on()
method is invoked, the event name is .subscribe()
d for you. Each wildcard (*
) or regexp capture group is passed to the callback along with regular message arguments.
app.js:
var axon = require('axon')
, sock = axon.socket('pub-emitter');
sock.connect(3000);
setInterval(function(){
sock.emit('login', { name: 'tobi' });
}, 500);
logger.js:
var axon = require('axon')
, sock = axon.socket('sub-emitter');
sock.bind(3000);
sock.on('user:login', function(user){
console.log('%s signed in', user.name);
});
sock.on('user:*', function(action, user){
console.log('%s %s', user.name, action);
});
sock.on('*', function(event){
console.log(arguments);
});
Socket Options
Every socket has associated options that can be configured via get/set
.
identity
- The "name" of the socket that uniqued identifies it.retry timeout
- The amount of time until retries will not be attempted again.
PubSockets additionally have options for batching:
batch max
- Max amount of messages to buffer in memory [10].batch ttl
- Amount of time in milliesconds to buffer messages before sending [100].
Binding / Connecting
In addition to passing a portno, binding to INADDR_ANY by default, you
may also specify the hostname via .bind(port, host)
, another alternative
is to specify the url much like zmq via tcp://<hostname>:<portno>
, thus
the following are equivalent:
sock.bind(3000)
sock.bind(3000, '0.0.0.0')
sock.bind('tcp://0.0.0.0:3000')
sock.connect(3000)
sock.connect(3000, '0.0.0.0')
sock.connect('tcp://0.0.0.0:3000')
Protocol
The wire protocol is simple and very much zeromq-like, where <length>
is
a BE 24 bit unsigned integer representing a maximum length of roughly ~16mb. The <meta>
data byte is currently only used to store the codec, for example "json" is simply 1
,
in turn JSON messages received on the client end will then be automatically decoded for
you by selecting this same codec.
octet: 0 1 2 3 <length>
+------+------+------+------+------------------...
| meta | <length> | data ...
+------+------+------+------+------------------...
Thus 5 bytes is the smallest message axon supports at the moment. Later if
necessary we can use the meta to indicate a small message and ditch octet 2 and 3
allowing for 3 byte messages.
Codecs
To define a codec simply invoke the axon.codec.define()
method, for example
here is the JSON codec:
var axon = require('axon');
axon.codec.define('json', {
encode: JSON.stringify,
decode: JSON.parse
});
Note: codecs must be defined on both the sending and receiving ends, otherwise
axon cannot properly decode the messages. You may of course ignore this
feature all together and simply pass encoded data to .send()
.
Performance
Preliminary benchmarks on my Macbook Pro:
15 byte messages:
min: 280 ops/s
mean: 472,109 ops/s
median: 477,309 ops/s
total: 10,758,780 ops in 24.633s
through: 6.75 mb/s
64 byte messages:
min: 218 ops/s
mean: 462,286 ops/s
median: 461,512 ops/s
total: 6,455,160 ops in 15.488s
through: 28.21 mb/s
1k messages:
min: 280 ops/s
mean: 382,829 ops/s
median: 382,764 ops/s
total: 3,333,581 ops in 15.126s
through: 373.85 mb/s
8k messages:
min: 392 ops/s
mean: 92,778 ops/s
median: 87,943 ops/s
total: 1,257,430 ops in 21.735s
through: 724.82 mb/s
What's it good for?
Axon are not meant to combat zeromq nor provide feature parity,
but provide a nice solution when you don't need the insane
nanosecond latency or language interoperability that zeromq provides
as axon do not rely on any third-party compiled libraries.
Running tests
$ npm install
$ make test
Authors
Links
License
(The MIT License)
Copyright (c) 2012 TJ Holowaychuk <tj@vision-media.ca>
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining
a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the
'Software'), to deal in the Software without restriction, including
without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish,
distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to
permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to
the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be
included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED 'AS IS', WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,
EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF
MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT.
IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY
CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT,
TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE
SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.