Quick-Start Guide

Installation

$ npm install hudson-taylor --save

At the moment HT only has a Node.JS library, we’re hoping to change that very soon!

Let’s go

To get started, there are 7 things you need to do:

  1. Decide on a method of communication to use, HTTP, TCP or something else.
  2. Create a service
  3. Add methods to our service
  4. Start our service
  5. Create a client
  6. Connect our client
  7. Use our client!

Preamble

Require things we need to…

var ht = require('hudson-taylor')

1. Decide on a transport

HT officially supports 3 different types of transports - HTTP, TCP and Local (to get more info go to their respective documentation pages)

The Local transport comes bundled with the core HT library, but HTTP and TCP are shipped separately.

Local

var transport = new ht.Transports.Local()

HTTP

var httpTransport = require('ht-http-transport')

var transport = new httpTransport({
  host: '127.0.0.1',
  port: 8080
})

TCP

var tcpTransport = require('ht-tcp-transport')

var transport = new tcpTransport({
  host: '127.0.0.1',
  port: 8080
})

2. Create a service

To create a service you need to give it a transport to use.

var service = new ht.Service(transport)

3. Add a method

Next, we need to add a method which can be called. To do this, we use the .on function on the service.

// This function will just echo the data back to the client
service.on('echo', function (data, callback) {
  return callback(null, data)
})

4. Start the service

Lastly, if you chose the HTTP or TCP transport, we need to make the service start listening for connections..

service.listen(function (err) {
  if (err) {
    console.error('There was an error listening:', err)
  }
})

5. Create a client

Now that we have a service, we need a client to connect to it.

You can add multiple services to a single client, just pass multiple object keys when initialising.

You can also add services to a client at runtime by calling Client#add

var client = new ht.Client({
  // When using the client, or service above is now called 'test'
  test: transport
})

6. Connect the client

If you use a transport that requires a permanent connection (like our TCP transport), then you need to call .connect.

The HTTP transport does not require you to call .connect, even though you need to call .listen for a service. This is because it doesn’t need to create a persistent connection, and just uses plain HTTP calls as a client.

client.connect(function (err) {
  if (err) {
    console.error('There was an error connecting:', err)
  }
})

7. Use the client!

Now all of our setup is done, we can call our echo method.

client.call('test', 'echo', 'test data', function (err, response) {
  console.log(err)      // -> undefined
  console.log(response) // -> 'test data'
})