Remote Procedure Calls

Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) are deepstream’s mechanism for request/response communication (think Ajax Request, but with added load balancing and rerouting etc).

RPCs are helpful on their own as a substitute for classic HTTP workflows, but are particularly useful when combined with other deepstream concepts like pub/sub or data-sync.

some great uses for RPC

• Querying your database If you’re using a database or search engine like ElasticSearch with deepstream, RPCs can be used to query data from it.
• Interfacing with REST APIs Need to retrieve a forecast from OpenWeatherMap, get a Github Repo’s commit history or query data from YQL? Create a process that forwards incoming RPCs as HTTP requests and returns the result.
• Securely combining multi step record transactions If you’re building a realtime voting system, you might want to increase the vote count AND flag the user as having voted at the same time. Use an RPC for that.
• Distributing computational load Running expensive tasks? Break your data into parts and let deepstream distribute them between RPC providers.
• Asking users for input Need to ask one of your users for input? RPCs can be used for question-answer workflows on the client as well.

Using RPCs

Let’s look at an example: adding two numbers (granted, not something you would strictly need to do on the backend, but lets keep things simple).

Every RPC is identified by a unique name. For our example, we’ll choose 'add-two-numbers'. First, a process needs to register as a “provider” - something that’s capable of fulfilling a request. This is done using client.rpc.provide(). Each client can only provide the rpc once.

client.rpc.provide('add-two-numbers', (data, response) => {
    response.send( data.numA + data.numB );
})

Now any client can invoke the remote method. This is done using client.rpc.make().

// ES5
client.rpc.make( 'add-two-numbers', { numA: 7, numB: 13 }, (err, result) => {
    // result == 20;
})

// ES6
try {
    const result = await client.rpc.make('add-two-numbers', { numA: 7, numB: 13 })
} catch (e) {
    // Possibly an error on RPC provider, a timeout or a missing RPC provider
}

If you want to switch off your provider, you can pass the rpc name to unprovide.

client.rpc.unprovide('add-two-numbers')

RPC routing

Processes can register as providers for multiple RPCs and many processes can provide the same RPC. deepstream will try to route a client’s request as efficiently as possible as well as load-balance incoming requests between the available providers.

Providers themselves are also able to reject requests (e.g. because they’re under heavy load) using response.reject() which will prompt deepstream to re-route the request to another available provider.

//Limiting to 50 simultaneous tasks at a time
let inProgress = 0;
client.rpc.provide('task', async (data, response) => {
    inProgress++;

    if( inProgress > 50 ) {
        response.reject()
    } else {
        const result = await doTask(url)
        inProgress--;
        response.send(result)
    }
})