OVERVIEW

Project	IChannel
Homepage	https://github.com/robgleeson/ichannel
Documentation	http://rubydoc.info/gems/ichannel/frames
CI
Author	Robert Gleeson

DESCRIPTION

A modern, flexible & easy to use interprocess communication(IPC) primitive. The basic premise is that you can "put" and "get" Ruby objects to/from a channel. This works across any Ruby process & its subprocesses, though, which is why it can be useful. You could describe putting and getting objects to/from the channel as message passing but the message could potentially be any Ruby object, although I think sending small messages(as a Hash) works very well for most scenarios.

EXAMPLES

1.

The first example shows off how you'd pass Ruby objects through a channel. The serializer of choice is Marshal but it could just as easily be JSON or YAML.

channel = IChannel.new Marshal
pid = fork do 
  channel.put Process.pid
  channel.put 'Hello!'
end
Process.wait pid
channel.get # => Fixnum
channel.get # => 'Hello!'

SERIALIZERS

To send Ruby objects between processes they have to be serialized, but on the bright side the number of serializers to choose from is vast. Marshal, JSON, & YAML are supported out of the box to name a few but adding support for other serializers is a trivial amount of work.

For example, here is a MessagePack serializer you could use:

require 'ichannel'
require 'msgpack'
serializer = Class.new do
  def self.dump(msg)
    MessagePack.pack msg
  end

  def self.load(msg)
    MessagePack.unpack msg
  end
end
channel = IChannel.new serializer

As you can see above as long as the serializer responds to .dump & .load it can be passed as a serializer to IChannel.

REAL WORLD EXAMPLES

I am using IChannel in a couple of my own personal projects:

• IProcess
  Provides a number of abstractions on top of spawning subprocesses and interprocess communication. IChannel was born inside IProcess but later extracted into its own project when I realised it could be useful on its own.

• xpool
  A lightweight UNIX(X) process pool implementation.

Other people have started to write code on top of ichannel, too:

• ifuture
  An implementation of Futures for Ruby using process forks and ichannel.

PLATFORM SUPPORT

supported

• CRuby (1.9+)

unsupported

• CRuby 1.8
• MacRuby
• JRuby
• Rubinius (support for Rubinius will come sometime in the future).

INSTALL

$ gem install ichannel

LICENSE

MIT. See LICENSE.txt.