zcm 1.0.0

A lightweight component model using ZeroMQ

• ZCM is a lightweight component model using ZeroMQ (http://zeromq.org/)

• Components are the building blocks of an application

• Components are characterized by ports and timers.

• Timers are bound to an operation and fire periodically

• There are four basic types of ports in ZCM: publisher, subscriber, client and server

• Publishers publish messages and Subscribers receive messages

• Clients request the services of a server by sending a request message; Servers receive such requests, process the requests, and respond back to the Client. Until the Server responds, the Client port blocks

• A Component can be instantiated multiple times in an application with different port configurations

• A component has a single operation queue that handles timer triggers and receives messages

• A component has an executor thread that processes this operation queue

• Components register functionality e.g. timer_operations, subscribers_operations etc.

• Component instances are grouped together into a process, called Actor

• An actor receives a configuration (.JSON) file, that contains information regarding the components to instantiate

• This configuration file also contains properties of all timers and ports contained by the component instances