Actor model assumes that everything is an actor.
According to AA, actors have following properties.
create send designate how to handle the next message
- Actor has an address.
- Actor can spawn another actor
- Actor can send and receive messages. Actor send messages only actores, whose address it knows.
Cocaine doesn't bring all of Actors properties into life. In Cocaine terms, Service is an Actor.
Service has an address. It is called an endpoint and it can be a tcp address or a unix socket pathname.
Service can spawn another service.
Service can receive messages. It happens as follows.
Client connects to Service's endpoint. Client and Service exchange framed messages using the socket.
Messages are formed using msgpack. A message is a tuple (array in msgpack terms) of: message_type_id (sometimes called method_id), session_id, and a tuple (array) of arguments.
method_ids are specified in corresponding protocols.