The Inquisitive Coder – Davy Brion's Blog

As i mentioned earlier in some of the comments, i’ve received permission from my employer (Item Solutions) to release our Request/Response Service Layer implementation in a new open source library named Agatha.

If you’re interested in trying it out, be sure to download it because i’ve already made a 1.0 beta 1 release available. Why 1.0 already? Well, because we have been using it in production for over a year now, so it’s definitely ready for serious usage already. The only thing that kept me from releasing an official 1.0 version already is that i want to add some small examples in the project: a service layer with 3 different clients (synchronous, asynchronous through Silverlight, and asynchronous through a regular .NET application). The example will be very small, basically just a hello world example but it should be enough to get you going very quickly.

The other thing that is still missing is an abstraction of the logging framework that is used. It’s currently still using log4net directly but that’s going to change soon. The IOC container usage has already been changed so it doesn’t directly depend on Castle Windsor anymore, and it should be very easy to plug in your preferred IOC container. Configuration of the library should be very easy as well, and if you look at the source code you’ll notice pretty quickly how easy it can be done. I do plan to make it even easier to configure the thing though. Unfortunately, you still need your typical WCF configuration although i’m going to try to reduce that as much as possible in a future version.

Also, if you look at the source code you’ll notice that there are no tests included. I do have tests for it, but i’ve chosen not to include them in this library since i really want to cover most of it with QuickNet. Regular unit tests will only be written for stuff that really doesn’t benefit from using QuickNet.

You’re obviously more than welcome to contribute to this project, though i hope you understand that i won’t just give anyone commit access right away (apart from the 2 people that already have access at this point) and that you sort of need to earn it. I will happily accept and apply patches, as long as they don’t break backwards compatibility, which is obviously pretty important considering the fact that we have quite a few projects that already depend on this. You’re obviously also welcome to join the mailinglist where both the usage and the further development of the library can be discussed.

Again, thanks to Item Solutions for allowing me to use the Request/Response Service Layer in a commercial project back when it was still merely a proof of concept… we certainly did run into a few issues with it at first, but all of that has been straightened out and it’s been working great for us ever since. Hopefully, you’ll now get to enjoy the same benefits it’s given us