Hoth

Creating a SOA requires a centralized location to define all services within the SOA. Furthermore you want to know where those services live.

How to use

Install

gem install hoth

Define services and modules

Service-Definition

This is how you define services:

Hoth::Services.define do

  service :service_name do |first_param, second_param|
    returns :descriptive_name
  end

end

This definition describes a service with a name, some parameters and its return value. The naming of the parameters is just for your understanding and will never be used again, so be descriptive. Same goes for the return value. The only exception is, if you want to assure that a service returns nil you can write

returns :nothing

A service whith this return value will always return nil. You can also specify ‘:nil`, with the same result.

Module-Definition

After defining all you services, you need to specify in which modules they live. Each module can be seen as a set of implemented services. Each module can have one or more endpoints. Here is how you define these modules with its endpoints and services:

Hoth::Modules.define do

  service_module :module_name do
    env :development, :test do
      endpoint :default do
        host 'localhost'
        port 3000
        transport :http
      end

      endpoint :bert do
        host 'localhost'
        port 9999
        transport :bert
      end
    end

    env :production do
      endpoint :default do
        host '192.168.1.12'
        port 3000
        transport :http
      end

      endpoint :bert do
        host '192.168.1.15'
        port 9999
        transport :bert
      end
    end

    add_service :first_service
    add_service :second_service, :via => :bert
  end

end

As you can see, it is possible to define different endpoints for different environments. Each endpoint has a host, a port and a transport-type. After defining your endpoints you can add your previously defined services to the module and define which endpoint they should use. If you do not specify an endpoint the :default endpoint will be used.

Integrate in your project

Just execute current code (in rails you can add this line to an initializer):

Hoth.init!

By default, Hoth looks for the files service_definition and module_definition in the config-Directory (‘./config`). If you need to load these files from another place, just set `Hoth.config_path` to your needs.

Note on Patches/Pull Requests

Fork the project.
Make your feature addition or bug fix.
Add tests for it. This is important so I don’t break it in a future version unintentionally.
Commit, do not mess with rakefile, version, or history. (if you want to have your own version, that is fine but bump version in a commit by itself I can ignore when I pull)
Send me a pull request. Bonus points for topic branches.