Overview of the bindings
In the redpesk terminology, a binding is a software component loaded by the micro-service connector afb-binder.
Technically, care is taken that bindings can be loaded by any other micro-service connector implementing the correct software interface.
The micro-service framework is involved for inter-connection of bindings. This allows flexible configuration of implementation architecture and specially isolation of sensitive functionalities for (1) firewalling accesses (2) resilience in case of failures.
A binding is loaded by the binder either isolated or in group when security allows and when performance is expected.
A binding can provide 0, 1 or more API. API are the service implementations and provide a set (not empty) of verbs endpoints and a set (eventually empty) of events.
Bindings are micro services components. Such bindings are connected together by the micro service framework. The framework is able to run the bindings in the same process, in different processes on the same machine or in different computer.
This book describes how to write a binding or in other words how to add a new service to the system.
This section target developers.
This section shortly explain how to write a binding using the C programming language.
Nature of a binding
A binding is an independent piece of software providing a service pluggable into the system. That service is offered through named endpoints receiving requests. These named endpoints are called verbs.
Verbs** are grouped in coherent sets called API (Application Programming Interface).
Bindings are usually compiled as a shared library and are dynamically loaded by the micro-services binder.
The API is designated and accessed through its name. It contains several verbs that implement the binding functionalities. Each of these verbs is a method that processes requests of applications and sends results.
The methods of the bindings are noted api/verb where api is the API name of the binding and verb is the method’s name within the API.
The name of an API can be made of any characters except:
- the control characters (\u0000 .. \u001f)
- the characters of the set { ‘ ‘, ‘”’, ‘#’, ‘%’, ‘&’, ‘'’, ‘/’, ‘?’, ‘`’, ‘\x7f’ }
The names of the verbs can be any character.
Since version 4 of the framework, distinction is made between upper case and lower case latin letters. So API/VERB DOES NOT MATCH Api/Verb or api/verb anymore.
Versions of the bindings
The versions 1 and 2 of the binding API are now obsoleted.
The versions 3 and 4 are available. The version 3 is still supported and documented here.
The version 4 is the now growing version.