Chimera — Simple language agnostic framework for stand alone and distributed computing

Abstract

Component-Based Software Engineering (CBSE) is a branch of software engineering that emphasizes the separation of concerns with respect to the wide-ranging functionality available throughout a given software system. The main advantage of CBSE is separation of components. A single component only focus on a single task or a related collection of tasks which allowing software developer to reuse the component for other use-cases. By using this approach, software developers can focus on single components rather than dealing with complex monolithic source code. Several approaches have already been developed in order to achieve ideal CBSE. The earliest implementation was UNIX pipe and redirect, while the newer approach including CORBA, XML-RPC, and REST. Unfortunately those approaches are either too complex or lack of features. Therefore, a simple language-agnostic framework, so called Chimera, was developed in this research. Chimera was built on top of Node.js. This framework allows developer to build pipe flow in a chain (a YAML formatted file) as well as defining global variables. Compared to UNIX named and unnamed pipe, this format is easier and more flexible. On the other hand, unlike XML-RPC, REST, and CORBA, Chimera is much simpler. HTTP protocol is only required for distributed computing scenario. Nor it require the components to be aware that they works on top of the framework.