beamed

A blazing fast, slim communication protocol for NodeJS IPC.

Features

• A lightweight protocol minimizes network traffic and provides high processing performance
• The TypeScript API enables you to specify strictly typed endpoints and reuse the same type definitions on client and server side
• Support for Unix, Windows, TCP and TLS sockets
• Requesting, messaging and publish / subscribe
• Send any payload (objects, buffers and strings)
• No third party dependencies

Example

shared.ts

enum AuthTopics {
  login, // can be strings or numbers
}
interface AuthApi {
  [AuthTopics.login]: {
    req: Credentials;
    res: User;
  };
}

server.ts

import { createServer } from "beamed";
import { AuthApi, AuthTopics } from "./shared";
 
const bs = createServer<AuthApi>()
  .onRequest(AuthTopics.login, authenticate)
  .listen("/tmp/auth-test");

client.ts

import { connect } from "beamed";
import { AuthApi, AuthTopics } from "./shared";
 
const bc = connect<AuthApi>("/tmp/auth-test");
bc.request(AuthTopics.login, new Credentials("user", "p4ssw0rd")).then((user) =>
  console.log(user)
);

Protocol

Message types (Not completely implementing yet).

Type	Message-Pattern	Examples
Request	<length>?<topic>\|<id>[\|payload]	19?1\|8\|J{"foo":"bar"} 5?2\|45
Response	<length>.<id>[\|payload]	17.8\|J{"foo":"bar"} 3.45
Error-Response	<length>X<id>\|<error-code>[\|message]	17.8\|J{"foo":"bar"} 6X45\|42
Subscribe	<length>+<topic>	2+1
Unsubscribe	<length>-<topic>	2-1
Message / Push	<length>!<topic>[\|payload]	17!1\|J{"foo":"bar"} 2!2

Where the tokens have the following format

Token	Format	Note
length	numeric	The byte length of the message content without this length (auto-generated)
topic	utf-8 (except \|)	You can use TS Enums
id	numeric	The request id (auto-generated)
error-code	utf-8 (except \|)	You can use TS Enums
message	utf-8	Custom Error decription
payload	utf-8 or Buffer	Prefixed by a character that determines the content type: J for Json, B for binary data, T for text