Lobby

Lobby is an open-source pluggable platform for data delivery.

Overview

At the core, Lobby is a framework to assemble network APIs and backends. It provides several key features:

Topics: Applications can create topics they can use to save data using the API of their choice. A topic is bound to a particular backend, Lobby can route data to the right backend so applications can target multiple stores using different topics.
Protocol and backend agnostic: Data can be received using HTTP, gRPC, asynchronous consumers or by any other means and delivered to any database, message broker or even proxied to another service. Lobby provides a solid framework that links everything together.
Plugin based architecture: Lobby can be extended using plugins. New APIs and backends can be written using any language that supports gRPC.

How it works

Topic

Lobby uses a concept of Topic to store data. Each topic is associated to a specific backend and provide an unified API to send values.

Backend

A backend is the storage unit used by Lobby. It usually represents a datastore or a message broker but can litteraly be anything that satisfies the backend interface, like an http proxy, a file or a memory store. By default, Lobby is shipped with a builtin BoltDB backend and provides MongoDB and Redis backends as plugins.

Entrypoints

Lobby can run multiple servers at the same time, each providing a different entrypoint to manipulate topics. Those entrypoints can create and manipulate all or part of Lobby's topics. By default, Lobby runs an HTTP server and a gRPC server which is the main communication system, also used to communicate with plugins. NSQ is provided as a plugin.

Usage

Running Lobby:

lobby run

The previous command runs the gRPC server, the HTTP server and the BoltDB backend.

To run Lobby with plugins:

lobby run --server=nsq --backend=mongo --backend=redis

The previous command adds a NSQ consumer, a MongoDB and a Redis backend.

Currently, Lobby contains no topics.

The following command creates a topic with a Redis backend using the HTTP API:

curl -X POST -d '{"name": "quotes", "backend": "redis"}' http://localhost:5657/v1/topics

Once the topic is created, data can be sent to it.

The following command will send the following value in the quotes topic.

curl -X POST -d 'There is no blue without yellow and without orange.' \
                                  http://localhost:5657/v1/topics/quotes

asdine / lobby