MaXX Interactive Desktop Architecture
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Goals and Requirements
- Provide a secure modern and robust computational environment for smart applications and services.
- Support both local and distributed deployment.
- Be modular, expandable and flexible while supporting a loosely couple design.
- Do more with less. Meaning be smart in how resources are used and keep it in mind.
- Be as fast and efficient as possible. It is a balancing act and it always depends on the use-case.
- Support CPU architecture specific optimizations.
- Support Hardware Acceleration (GPU decode/encode & rendering).
- Support high performance asynchronous messaging for inter-application communications.
- Can run on different OS and CPU architectures (Intel/AMD, ARM and RISC-V).
Architecture
The MaXX Desktop's global architecture is based on the following five(5) principles in order to ensure the above goals and requirements are met.
- Follows the SOLID Principles
- Follow the Clean Architecture
- Support a Multi-layers architecture style for better/clearer separation with clear boundaries, responsibilities and dependency.
- Support a Message-Driven architecture for both inter-process communication and asynchronous event-driven execution.
- Support Shared Memory to prevent unnecessary copy/duplication of information when doing local (same machine) inter-process computations or when handling/displaying images over a local X11 session.
1.SOLID Principles
The SOLID principles were first conceptualized by Robert C. Martin in his 2000 paper, Design Principles and Design Patterns. These concepts were later built upon by Michael Feathers, who introduced us to the SOLID acronym. And in the last 20 years, these 5 principles have revolutionized the world of object-oriented programming, changing the way that we write software.
The SOLID design principles encourage developers to create more maintainable, understandable, and flexible software by shifting their focus on the functionality rather than the low-level details. Consequently, as an application grow in size, adeveloper can reduce its complexity and save his sanity.
The following 5 concepts make up our SOLID principles:
- Single Responsibility
- Open/Closed
- Liskov Substitution (not so much used anymore)
- Interface Segregation
- Dependency Inversion
While some of these words may sound daunting, they can be easily understood with some simple code examples. In the following sections, we'll take a deep dive into what each of these principles means, along with a quick Java example to illustrate each one.
2.Clean Architecture
Clean Architecture is a way of developing software, such that just by looking at the source code of a program, you should be able to tell what the program does. The programming language, hardware and the software libraries used to achieve the objective of the program should become irrelevant. The aim of Clean Architecture is to make the following sentence possible: ‘Hey, the arrangement of directories tells me this is a shopping cart app. I don’t know which programming language or software library is used. I need to go into the directories and find out.’
3.Multi-Layered Architecture
The architecture is inspired from multi-layered Enterprise class system where each layer defines precise responsibility and its application/service (a.k.a. component) exposes functionalities or behaviors. At the heart of the architecture are clear communications channels between components and their respective layers and well defined data-contracts exposed by each of them.
Overall, this design strategy will improve robustness of the Desktop experience, provide solid foundations to build upon, allow a clean separation of concern, modularity and overall re-usability. Another way to see MaXX's architecture design is to look at micro-services architecture, but from a Desktop application perspective where each layer of the architecture is composed of specialized micro-services performing specific tasks.
Layered Architecture by responsibility
The MaXX Desktop architecture is divided into three (3) responsibility layers from which MaXX's application and service can be built. Below are the layers in question with a short description for each:
- User Experience/Presentation - layer performing visual-oriented tasks like displaying User Interfaces and/or capturing user's input. Components and/or applications on that layers are communicating with the Desktop Support layer for computation and resources access via proxy like services.
- Desktop Support - layer provides desktop computation support while providing an abstraction-layer to various Back-end Services, where most of the actions are taking place. This layer exposed some of those computations as functionally aggregator (composition and proxy design pattern) where a specific Desktop Support functionally is realized by utilizing one or more Back-end Service and an orchestration service that can coordinate the execution of other services/components.
- Back-end Services - layer is where most of the actual work is performed by low-level services/components. This layer can only communicate with components/services from the Desktop Support layer. Among the functionalities exposed by this layer are: hardware and application monitoring from MaXX Monitor, file-system accesses and configuration management via MaXX Settings.
The diagram below illustrates the current MaXX Desktop architecture
MaXX Links (Inter-Layer Communication)
The MaXX Desktop Architecture is planning tree(3) means of inter-layer communication mechanisms ensuring security and maintaining separation of responsibility.
CLI or Command Line Interface - allows a command-line driven client/server like interaction where the Client CLI initiate a CLI session with the Server CLI counterpart and sends one or many CLI commands. The communication is obviously synchronous and based on a request/response semantic that is redirected through the POSIX standard I/Os of the CLI Client application. Nothing prevents the Server CLI to emit an event during the processing of a CLI command. The CLI mechanism is great to provide a fire-and-forget interaction semantic.
HTTP or REST Interface - allows a Web/REST driven client/server like interaction where the HTTP Client sends a request to a HTTP Service. The communication is again synchronous and based on a request/response semantic using HTTP/S and predefined data types. Nothing prevents the HTTP Service to emit an event during the processing of the request. This mechanism is great to provide a a full features API style integration.
Messaging - allows synchronous, asynchronous or event-driven interactions where a producer create a message and send it to a destination via a communication channel. One or many consumers are at the receiving end of that channels allowing either point-to-point or publish-subscribe delivery mechanism. The payload of a message can either contain real data (passing by value) or provide a secured shared-memory location where the data can be retrieved (passing by reference).
A message is an item of data that is sent to a specific destination. An event is a signal emitted by a component upon reaching a given state. An event can be transported via a message, not the way around
The diagram below illustrates the inter-layer communication mechanisms.
4.Message-Driven
The Message-Driven architecture provides low dependency, no tight coupling and robust communication between components and services. MaXX Links Framework will provide all the necessary features and abstractions to supports modern multi-protocols synchronous/asynchronous messaging communications. Things such as: load balancing, tasks distribution, high availability, decoupling client-server with simple consumer/producer semantic are all possible (and in many cases rather simple to implement) through Messaging.
Messaging also introduce the ability to support a polyglot code base where components integration are performed via high performance messaging channels while supporting both local and distributed environment. It does not really matter anymore in which programming language the component/service is written, as long as it supports Messaging ØMQ and complies to predefined data-contracts.
Through MaXX Links, any C/C++/Python or Java application can be integrated into the MaXX Desktop environment or new modern features can be added to an existing application very easily.
The Messaging approach as been proven to yield excellent values by allowing ongoing improvement of components, total decoupling between producers and consumers and bring robust asynchronous and event-driven capability. As long as data-contracts are respected, changes documented+communicated, with versioning and backward compatibility supported, this is one of the best way to do inter-application communication.
The MaXX Interactive team bring more than 2 decades of real world expertise in High Performance Messaging Systems. That must count for something :)
5.Shared Memory
This practice is used throughout the MaXX Desktop, its applications and in the MaXX Vue thanks to MaXX Links.
We utilize this 'passing by reference' strategy quite heavily in GPES (General Purpose Execution Service) as a very efficient way to consume computation results without the net-impact. In some cases, all the work/computation, memory allocation and display are all performed by the GPU.
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