JSON RPC in Golang with AMQP

Question

I use "github.com/streadway/amqp" for async processing requests via queue (RabbitMQ).

And I use "github.com/gorilla/rpc" to register my service without workaround, but I have to use ugly solution for conversion amqp.Delivery to http.Request (mux.Server can works with http.Request only).

Can I use more elegant solution for this task?

I can't find JSON RPC router for AMQP.

Answer 1

First, RPC and pub-sub (e.g. AMQP) are two very different beasts; trying to use one to implement the other isn't necessarily wrong or bad, but it's definitely suspicious, and implies that there could be a breakdown somewhere in the design. So I would highly recommend reconsidering the design starting with your business goals and make sure that what you're trying to implement is actually the correct way to achieve the desired functionality.

That said, what you're describing is basically possible, but you want to move your abstraction up a level. Trying to send a http.Request via AMQP is mixing protocols in a way that's only going to lead to more problems. The cleaner way to implement this behavior would be to have an HTTP handler that handles http.Requests (as normal), and a AMQP handler that handles amqp.Deliverys (as normal), and have each of those handlers call a shared business logic handler which deals only in your domain model.

So, your HTTP handler would parse an HTTP request and turn it into a domain object - you don't give any concrete details in the question so I'll invent something like maybe myapp.UserRegistration. Your HTTP handler would pass that to a myapp.UserService which would handle the actual business logic of registering a user, it would return a result, which you would then transform into the appropriate type, marshal to JSON, and send back to the client in an http.Response. myapp.UserService would know nothing about HTTP or AMQP; it operates only on your own domain types.

Your AMQP handler would pick up a message, parse it into the same myapp.UserRegistration type, pass it to the same myapp.UserService handler, and get the same response back - ensuring that the business logic for AMQP and HTTP behaves the same way. Then you'd get your response back, and... well, this is AMQP, so you don't get to send a response to the client. I don't know your setup, maybe you have another queue you can send the response back on, maybe you don't care about the response and can discard it. This is where the difference between RPC and AMQP is most apparent.

This also makes your business logic, HTTP handler, and AMQP handler more testable in isolation because you're separating the protocol logic from the business logic, which can be helpful even when you aren't trying to deal with multiple protocols (i.e. it's not a bad idea even if you're only doing HTTP)

I hope that at least gives you enough info to put you on the right track in your implementation. Good luck!