Cargoplane - Serverless publish/subscribe for webapps and AWS¶
What is this?¶
Cargoplane is a toolset to help you quickly transport message cargo between webapp clients and a backend running in the AWS cloud.
Unlike other solutions, this one does not rely on a 3rd party (just you and AWS) and is entirely serverless. Also unlike some alternatives, you application controls what topics each client has access to subscribe to and which topics they may publish to.
Cargoplane is written in Typescript, but transpiled to Javascript. The Lambda code is compatible with Node.js 8 and 10. The client code is ES5, and so will work in any remotely modern browser.
This repository is developed and maintained by the Onica Cloud Native Development Practice.
This collection is part of Onica’s commitment to give back to the open source community. Find this and other Onica open source repositories on GitHub.
Example Uses¶
- Chat
- The classic example for this is a chat ability between web site visitors and company support. In fact, a simple version of this serves as the demo.
- Push notifications
- Web app users can be notified of events that have occurred in the cloud.
- Data Refresh
- The classic problem with web apps is knowing when the data showing in the browser is outdated. Cargoplane was originally built to solve this problem. When data is changed by one user, a message can be published (by that client or by a Lambda processing the change) to subscribing clients that a change has happened. The other clients then know to refresh their content from the cloud. (Only small data changes should be sent directly through Cargoplane.)
Why Cargoplane?¶
Onica’s early OSS releases have had aviation themed names; this may or may not have something to do with the CTO being a pilot. Nobody really knows.
Cargoplane is visualized as a means to transport (fly) cargo (information) from one point to another. There isn’t much more to it than that.
Also, the name was available. That was a big factor.