zcm 1.0.0

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