Operator

The operator is one of the key building blocks of a micro pipeline. Compared to sources and emitters it is used to execute any operation on messages floating through its body.

To support more than just single message in, single message out operations, there exist two different specifications:

• direct response operators
• delayed response operators

Direct response operators receive a single message, process its contents and return a response which may hold zero to n results.

Delayed response operators receive a single message and return immediately to the caller without any response. To retrieve their computation results a wait strategy must be provided which decides when to collect the data. Wait strategies may be content or timer based.

Technical interface

Although a technical interface for an operator exists, it must be specified during implementation time wether to provide a delayed response or a direct response operator.

Both extend the common operator interface which does not suffice to create an operator at all. Thus implementations based on the common interface and annotated as being either a delayed or a direct response operator will fail to work in pipeline setups due to missing methods defined by the two distinct interfaces.

Tutorial

To learn more about how to develop your own operator, please follow this tutorial overview and select a specific type (direct or delayed response) to implement.