Glossary

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Actor

Actors are what exchanges messages through the bus. Thay can be an Emitter, a Consumer or a Worker.

An actor is always associated to a Actor Account, to ensure security.

It must have one and only one Role.

Emitter

A kind of Actor that sends envelopes to the bus.

Consumer

A kind of Actor that receives envelopes from the bus.

Worker

A kind of Actor that receives envelopes and sends envelopes in reaction.

Role

An Actor property. Pipelines can select actors by roles instead of name/id.

Account

An account is what allows a person or an application to connect to the bus. There are several kinds of accounts: Actor Account, User Account and Gateway Account

Actor Account

Associated to one or several actors, it is used by xbus-client or other connectors to connect to xbus.

User Account

Used by users of the xbusctl command, or the web interface. It allows configuration of the pipelines, accounts, actors and pipelines, as well as viewing, and acting on processes.

Gateway Account

An account with very specific privileges needed by a gateway program like xbus-http.

Connector

A set of actors that connects an application to the bus.

Pipeline

A pipeline defines a path between an emitter, workers and consumers, in the form of a directed acyclic graph.

It ‘matches’ incoming envelopes based on the message types they contain.

Contents

Message

A message is what applications connected to the bus send and receive. A message must have a type, which can be any alphanumeric string, and a body that can be anything. A big body will be chunked for transfers.

It is identified by a GUID.

Envelope

An envelope is a container for messages. It can contain any positive number of messages.

It is identified by a GUID.

Event

Deprecated term for Message

Process

Process

An incoming envelope creates a Process that will track its path within the bus. The first step of a process is to match a Pipeline in order to known which path should be followed.

Each process has a status, that can be one of RUNNING, PAUSED, DONE and ERROR.

RUNNING

The status of a process that is not yet over. No error has occured, and some actors still need to work or are working.

PAUSED

The status of a process that has been paused by the operator.

DONE

The status of a process that successfully runned.

ERROR

The status of a process in which an error occured.