Rhino Service BusLocality and Independence

time to read 2 min | 284 words

One of the main design goals for Rhino Service Bus was locality and independence of the end point. What do I mean by that?

Well, a Rhino ESB endpoint should have no dependency on any external service in order to operate. Examples of common external services are things like subscription services, timeout managers and error reporting. I already discussed how I handle errors, timeouts and subscriptions with Rhino Service Bus. So the question is why independence is such an important concept.

The answer is quite simple: reduce the number of moving parts. If I need to have a timeout service running to have my timeouts running, this is a problem. If subscriptions don’t work because I didn’t started the subscription service, that is a problem. Thos are problems because those things will happen, and figuring out what exactly is going on is hard, painful and not really recommended. Well, the first time you run into this, at least. As such, I sought to make sure that there would be only a single place that you would have to look in order to get things working.

There are other aspects of this as well, frankly. Less moving parts usually equal to less complexity, but the most important issue is that we have much better options for debugging.

The only place that you need to check for anything is the endpoint.

We currently don’t have tooling (because we rely of the default MSMQ ones to do a fairly adequate job for now), but a few spikes that I run has turned out some really nice tooling is quite simple, and the approach is the same for everything.

More posts in "Rhino Service Bus" series:

  1. (08 Aug 2009) DHT Saga Sate Persisters Options
  2. (21 Jan 2009) Concurrency Violations are Business Logic
  3. (19 Jan 2009) Concurrency in a distributed world
  4. (16 Jan 2009) Saga and State
  5. (15 Jan 2009) Field Level Security
  6. (14 Jan 2009) Understanding a Distributed System
  7. (14 Jan 2009) The Starbucks example
  8. (14 Jan 2009) Locality and Independence
  9. (14 Jan 2009) Managing Timeouts