Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Getting started with MassTransit

Ok so I continue to play with MassTransit and I really like it. Unfortunately I still think there is a small barrier to entry that is stopping people from using it. The guys who have written it have done a great job of building an easy to use stack, but as it grows it may feel a bit like you don't know where to start.What I aim to do here is break the whole thing down to easy to understand pieces (theory) and then get the pieces together (practice!)

MassTransit leans on the concept of Publish/Subscribe or Pub/Sub. The idea being I can raise an event by sending a message (publishing) and any number of consumers that are interested in that message can listen in and consume that message (subscribing). This means as new subscriber become known the publisher itself does not have to be aware of its existence, the Bus (MT) will deal with it, providing a nice sense of loose coupling.

An example could be a new person starts at your place of work. His new boss goes in to the HR system and creates a new employee request*. This goes off to HR where it is actioned and a new Employee notification* is made. A slew of process are now kickoff that HR has no idea about , nor do they care. These could include the new employees desk set up, Identification preparation, security clearance checks, various inductions bookings... who knows? If a department or application are interested in that message they just subscribe to it.

*These are the potential published message

Right, lets delve in to the specifics:

Messages

Consumers/Subscribers

Publishers

EndPoints

Host & Set up

Sagas

 

 

For background on MassTransit see my previous intro post here and some here

1 comment:

Chris said...

Nice to see this series of posts. Looking forward to more!