Glossary

This document defines the key elements of the service-oriented programming paradigm.

This terminology is used in the Jolie website and documentation.

Interface

A machine-readable and -checkable declaration of a set of operations, which defines an API. An interface acts as the contract between a service and its clients.

Ports

Ports are endpoints used for sending and receiving messages. There are two kind of ports:

input ports are used for receiving messages;
and output ports are used for sending messages.

A port includes at least three elements:

the location at which the port is deployed, e.g., an IP address;
the transport protocol used for communications through the port;
the interface that the port makes accessible.

Surface

The resulting interface offered by an inputPort, intended as the sum of all the available interfaces at the given port.

Connection

We say that an output port is connected to an input port when it is meant that messages sent through the former will reach the latter.

This typically happens when the output port has the same location and protocol as the target input port, but network or container configurations might alter this. As such, knowing the connections in a system requires looking both at the definitions of the involved ports and how they are deployed in the system.

Service (or microservice)

A service is a running software application that supplies APIs in the form of operations available at its input ports. It communicates with other services by message passing.

Service definition

The code that, when executed, implements a service. When clear from the context, we simply use the word service interchangeably.

Conversation

A conversation is a series of related message exchanges between two or more services.

During a conversation between a client and a service, the set of available operations offered by the service to the client might change over time (e.g., after successfully logging in the client might gain access to more operations).

A service is always willing to serve requests for its available API.

Behaviour

The definition of some communication and/or computation logic to be executed at runtime for implementing a service's API.

Process

A running instance of a behaviour, equipped with its own private state and message queues.

Service dependency

When a service A has an output port that needs to be connected to another service B in order for the service A to function, we say that service A depends on service B.

service definitions

Service network

A group of services and their connections.

Networks are always connected, in the sense that there is always a path from one service to another, possibly through many connections.

Networks might have private locations: locations that are visible only to the services in the network.

The nature of a private location depends on the implementation, e.g., shared-memory channels, local sockets, virtual networks.

Networks can be composed into bigger networks.

Network boundary

Given a service network, we call its boundary the set of:

the input ports exposed by the services in the network that can be reached from outside of the network;
the output ports that the services inside of the network require to be connected to services outside of the network.

Jolie Documentation