Blog @ Digital Bazaar

Monarch – Next Generation REST Web Services

Monarch, the MOdular Networking ARCHitecture, is a set of libraries and tools for creating high-performance REST-based, native JSON Web Services. The framework is best suited for sites that rely on thousands of AJAX calls per minute to provide their core functionality. We have discussed the excellent performance characteristics of Monarch before – today we release it as open source software for the rest of the world to use.

A few of Monarch’s more notable features are provided below:

It is native and cross-platform, the same framework can be utilized in Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. The framework is designed to scale from the beginning. Developers create pluggable modules that can easily and automatically scale when used with multi-cpu and multi-core systems.

Monarch generates small, high-performance executables – small enough to run on modern cellphones or other portable devices. It is modular, which allows the developer to only include the modules that are necessary for the particular application.

Security is a very important concern for modern web services, which is why Modest contains a complete SSL/TLS and AES encryption/decryption stack. At its core is a network-centric design, containing everything necessary to create a high-performance AJAX backend including a light-weight, high-performance, multi-threaded HTTP server. Web service calls can be placed into XML or JSON data containers, which integrate well with current and next generation technologies such as XMLHttpRequest and HTML5. The data validation features ensure the validity of incoming or outgoing JSON data to AJAX front-end services.

All incoming and outgoing data to Modest allows for a stream-based computing and processing model, thus saving on memory and disk usage. The networking core is capable of in-line encryption, steganography and decryption of very large audio and video data streams.

Monarch doesn’t try to establish a “center of the world” development model. Rather, it integrates very well with existing libraries and network services like SMTP, UPnP, Sphinx, sqlite, and MySQL.

Its microkernel architecture rounds out the impressive throughput that Modest is capable of achieving. The microkernel enables hundreds of thousands of simultaneous micro-processes (fibers) to operate without operating system intervention.

There are many more details about Modest that can be found on the wiki page. You can download and compile the source yourself from github.

1 Comment

1. [...] December 2009 we released Monarch, an ultra-fast web application server framework, as an open source project. This month, we’re releasing a reference implementation of the PaySwarm web platform. [...]

   Pingback by Blog @ Digital Bazaar » PaySwarming Goes Open Source — February 1, 2010 #

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