mats3 VS ideas2

The “restart from where it failed”-aspect was a big reason for why I made Mats3. It is message-based, async, transactional, staged stateless services, or message-oriented asynchronous RPC. Due to the transactionality, and the “state lives on the wire”, if a flow fails, it can be restarted from where it left off.

https://mats3.io

I am truly finding it hard to explain it. I have tried along a dozen angles. I actually think it is a completely new concept - and that might be the problem.

There is an illustration on the front-page: https://mats3.io/

Here's a set of small answers to "What is Mats?": https://github.com/centiservice/mats3/blob/main/README.md#wh...

Here's a way to code up Mats3 endpoints using JBang and a small toolkit which makes it extremely simple to explore the ideas: https://github.com/centiservice/mats3/blob/main/README.md#wh...

If you read these and then get it, I would be extremely happy if you gave me a sentence or paragraph that would have led you to understanding faster!

The use of JMS is just a transport. I could really have used anything, incl. any MQ, or ZeroMQ, or plain TCP - or just a shared table in a database.

Wrt. WebSockets, that is a transport typically between a server, and a end-user client, e.g. an iOS App. Actually, there's also a "sister project", MatsSockets, that bring the utter async-ness of Mats3 all the way out to the client, e.g. a webpage or an app. https://matssocket.io/

NATS is just a message queue, with some ability to orchestrate. I do not like this concept of orchestration as an external service, that is one of the founding ideas of Mats3: Do the orchestration within each service, as you would do if you employed REST as the ISC mechanism.

Read more about mats3 here: https://mats3.io/

I've made a Java library to facilitate the latter. https://mats3.io/ - you can start reading here: https://mats3.io/docs/message-oriented-rpc/, or test out some code right away, using JBang, here: https://mats3.io/explore/jbang-mats/

I have explained about this on the frontpage of Mats3: https://mats3.io/, and more in-depth in the first step of the "Walkthrough": https://mats3.io/docs/message-oriented-rpc/ - and even more into it at "Rationale for Mats", here: https://mats3.io/background/rationale-for-mats/

JBang’s tagline: “Lets Students, Educators and Professional Developers create, edit and run self-contained source-only Java programs with unprecedented ease.”

Mats3’s tagline: “Message-Oriented Async RPC. Message-based Interservice Communication made easy! Naturally resilient and highly available microservices, with great DevX and OpsX.”

JBang is a cool "execute single Java source file with dependencies" solution, which offers a simple way to test new libraries. The article tries to showcase Mats3's core concepts through a series of JBang scripts.

To streamline the process, a small library called 'MatsJbangKit' has been developed, which not only takes care of pulling up the Mats infrastructure but also depends on all the necessary dependencies. This means users only need to reference this single library in their JBang scripts. The aim is to pique curiosity and inspire further exploration of Mats3 and its potential.

If you like it, a star on Github would be much appreciated: https://github.com/centiservice/mats3

This is a "tack on"-tool to the otherwise fully async nature of Mats/messaging.

> For this to really work well, the message passing has to be integrated with the CPU dispatcher

It sounds like you are 100% set on speed. This is not really what Mats is after - it is meant as a inter-service communcation system, and IO will be your limiting factor at any rate. Mats sacrifices a bit of speed for developer ergonomics - the idea is that by easily enabling fully async development of ISC in a complex microservice system, you gain back that potential loss from a) actually being able to use fully async processing (!), and b) the inherent speed of messaging (it is at least as fast as HTTP, and you avoid the overhead of HTTP headers etc.

It is mentioned here, "What Mats is not": https://github.com/centiservice/mats3#what-mats-is-not

My blogging/journalling setup is simple.

I just use GitHub. I just rely on the default repository view on GitHub.com

I create a README.md and add markdown headings to the bottom or to the top (bottom if its a journal, top if it's a blog) and then when I get to 100-800 I create a new repository and repeat.

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas (2013)

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas4

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas3

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas2

Thanks for posting this Ask HN question.

I journal ideas and thoughts about computers and software. I am interested in software architecture, parallelism, async, coroutines, database internals, programming language implementation, software design and the web.

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas (2013)

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas2

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas3

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas4 <-- this is recent but needs editing

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas5 <-- this is what I'm working on now

https://github.com/samsquire/startups

https://github.com/samsquire/blog <-- thoughts I want to write about, but incomplete

I use README.md on GitHub and create a heading at the bottom for each entry. I use Typora on Windows or the GitHub web interface to edit.

[3]: https://github.com/samsquire/ideas2#5-open-demand-mapping-an...

Thanks for this.

I love the idea of breaking up a flow into separately scheduled but still linear message flow.

I wrote about a similar idea in ideas2

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas2#84-communication-code-sl...

The idea is that I enrich my code with comments and a transpiler schedules different parts of the code to different machines and inserts communication between blocks.

I read about how Zookeeper algorithm for transactionality and robustness to messages being dropped, which is interesting reading.

https://zookeeper.apache.org/doc/r3.4.13/zookeeperInternals....

How does Mats compare?

LMAX disruptor has a pattern where you split up each side of an IO request into two events, to avoid blocking in an handler. So you would always insert a new event to handle an IO response.

I am more likely to journal and blog if the friction to creating a post is as simple as opening a document and writing. The important part of journalling or note software is that you actually create notes. I did use Hetzner to run a Wordpress blog but it had an overhead of server expenses and keeping Wordpress up-to-date.

I don't want my data trapped in a proprietary system where it is difficult to export, so I use plaintext. I looked into Publii [1] but I prefer my current plaintext setup. Today I journal software ideas, computer ideas, startup ideas and community ideas on GitHub in the open, as README.md files. My journal is all public on GitHub at the following links. There are over 550+ journal entries, I am sure you shall enjoy them.

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas2

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas3

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas4

https://github.com/samsquire/startups

https://getpublii.com/