WOSH system: Architecture

This page introduces the WOSH system by an high-level perspective.

This is one of the first documents you should probably read.

Overview

WOSH is a system of systems. We may define it as an (application-level) operative system by many points of view.

Some technical definitions of WOSH are:

MOM (Message Oriented Middleware) - means that high-level components and hosts cooperates only by sending and receiving messages

SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) - means that real functionalities are provided by services and the WOSH system is the platform where they live and interact each other

OOP (Object Oriended Programming) - well that's pretty obvious, but it underlines how components are implemented and the overall approach

RAD (Rapid Application Developement) - by splitting complex problems and components into smaller pieces, we also increase standardization, usability and sharing of implmentations

Some notes about WOSH:

WOSH system should be generally considered as a network of hosts and not as a standalone application (even if it can work in such way). All hosts are idempotent by the networking point of view, in other words: there are no pre-defined servers and clients, each host is a client/server node.

WOSH is a (very) multi-thread software, because of that resources must be protected by Mutex or atomic operations. The knowledge of overall architecture and specific contexts is required in order to write safe code.

WOSH Core Architecture

As said in other parts of the documentation, any WOSH application is based on micro-kernel, while real services (which provide features to the users) are designed as (pluggable) services (and called Bundles).

WOSH System Architecture

Since WOSH Core library is fully multi-platform and included in every Application, its requirements are few and it is designed to be very scalable.

wosh::WoshKernel and Core-Modules are singletons and may be accessed (direct reference) as static objects.

WOSH Core Architecture

See also:: Core; wosh::WoshKernel

WOSH Bundle Architecture

WOSH Bundle Architecture

See also:: Bundles; wosh::Bundle

WOSH Security

Security is a very hot topic in a multi-user, multi-network system like WOSH.

Users (such as inhabitants) may access to WOSH features in many ways (channels), even through third-party networks (such as IM, mail, voice), because of that a flexible authentication system must be integrated into the system.

Since the system is based on Messages, the authentication approach is based on SecurityToken and signing (objects and messages), receiver evaluates those credentials against current ACL (Access Control List). Components such as wosh::PropertiesProvider provide custom ACL for each element.

Consider a single standalone WOSH Host.