n3rv, a ZeroMQ service framework

n3rv is a C++ library that leverages the power of ZeroMQ to create multiservices architectures. Using ZMQ as core communication mechanism, n3rv basically provides all the components that modern services development requires, meaning:

• A Services Directory & subscribing mechanism.
• An events handler.
• Messages encapsulation methods.
• Logging.
• An HTTP/ZeroMQ gateway.
• Dynamic architecture reconfiguration.

Actually it is quite similar to Facebook's fbzmq, but easier to use and with more features.

Full Documentation available at https://n3rvcpp.github.io

Architecture example

How does it work ?

Running nodes create ZMQ socket bindings, then register them to a directory service (service controller). Each update of the directory triggers a broadcast-update on all the nodes, thus making the bindings joinable by everyone.

From the developer's perspective, n3rv lets you implement custom service classes, inheriting from the n3rv::service superclass. In these custom classes you will describe the complete behaviour of your services:

• Which sockets they must bind.
• Which nodes they must connect to.
• Backend interractions.
• Business rules, ..

After that, you just need to instanciate your defined service classes to let the magics begin !

(Running example of a proto-algotrading solution using a n3rv multinodal architecture)

Documentation

You can get the full n3rv framework documentation at the following address: https://n3rvcpp.github.io

Changelog

v0.25:

• Added Support for static files serving in n3rv::httpservice.
• httpservice is now header-only, thus removing the need for libn3rvhttp.
• Small improvements in documentation.

v0.2:

• Added support for protcol buffers messages exchange.
• Added support for syslog in logger.
• New lookup mechanism, allowing to deal with lots of subscribed nodes and bindings.
• Additionnal work on unit tests and code coverage
• Documentation largely extended
• Many bugfixes

v0.15:

• Implementation of httpservice (HTTP<=>ZMQ gateway)
• started unit tests implementation.

v0.1:

• Initial version.

TOTO

• Implement redundency mechanisms for the service controller component.
• Better support of NATed networks for service controller.
• Add FastCGI and easy file serving support for the HTTP Gateway.
• Improve unit tests code coverage.
• WYSIWYG edtior to generate topologies and class templates (separate project).
• Webmin interface for service controller.
• Possible replacement of ZeroMQ by Nanomsg for services I/O.
• Python binding (maybe)

Contact

@WintermeW on twitter, or by email at [email protected]