federation

Introduction

Federation is an actor system for Node.js inspired by Erlang and Akka.

Install

$ npm install federation

Usage

Federation nodes can send and receive messages to each other.

var router = require('federation').router;

var node1  = router.createNode('node1');
var node2  = router.createNode('node2');

Send a Message

Every node exists at a URL, and can be messaged at that URL. For nodes on the same host, the host and protocol can be omitted.

var message = "Hello World";
var address = "/node2";
node1.tell(address,message);

Federation can also send messages across the network to remote nodes:

var address = "axon://192.168.0.12/node2";
var message = "Hello from 192.168.0.9";
node1.tell(address,message);

Receive Messages

Each node can be assigned a single receive function, which will be called whenever the node receives a message.

node1.receive = function(message){
  // handle message
}

Request/Reply Pattern

Nodes can reply contextually using the ask method.

node1
.ask('/node2','How old are you?')
.receive(function(msg){
  console.log('Got Reply',msg);
});

The request/reply pattern uses anonymous nodes, i.e. one-time actors. Anonymous nodes have a default timeout of 5000, after which an error will be triggered. You can respond to the error with:

node1.ask('/nod2','How old are you?')
.receive(function(msg){
  // handle reply
})
.error(function(err){
  // handle error
})