mtmk/ProtobufSockets

Simple .Net socket wrapper aimed at PubSub using protobuf-net

ProtobufSockets

Simple .Net socket wrapper aimed at PubSub using protobuf-net. It supports simple round-robin failover and transparent connection recovery if the publisher goes down temporarily. It is fully managed and does not need any native DLLs.

PM> Install-Package ProtobufSockets

Example

Here is the basic scenario where you can have an example up and running in a few minutes:

Define your messages:

[ProtoContract]
public class Message
{
    [ProtoMember(1)]
    public string Payload { get; set; }
}

Run publisher:

static void Main()
{
    using (var publisher = new Publisher(new IPEndPoint(IPAddress.Any, 34567)))
    {
        int i = 1;
        while (true)
        {
            Console.WriteLine("Publishing message #" + i);
            publisher.Publish(new Message {Payload = "payload" + i});
            i++;
            Thread.Sleep(1000);
        }
    }
}

Run subscriber:

static void Main()
{
    using (var subscriber = new Subscriber(new[] {new IPEndPoint(IPAddress.Loopback, 34567)}))
    {
        subscriber.Subscribe<Message>(m =>
        {
            Console.WriteLine("Received: {0}", m.Payload);
        });

        Console.ReadLine();
    }
}

Main scenario

A few backend services that needs to process light to medium load (tens to a few hundred messages per second) data streams in a ressilient fashion. There maybe multiple redundant publishers of the same data streams and multiple subscribers connecting to one of these publishers. In case a publisher goes down subscribers connects to the next available one. Silent network failures are handled by using hearbeat messages between publisher and subscriber pairs. Subscribers can also subscribe to predefined topics. A publisher might be publishing messages for multiple topics and it will only sends the ones a given subscriber is interested in.