mux-demux-stream
v0.0.4
Published
Multiplexer and demultiplexter for binary/text streams.
Downloads
19
Maintainers
Readme
Mux Demux Stream
Multiplexer and demultiplexter for binary/text streams with inspiration from the book Node.js Design Patterns by Mario Casciaro.
Multiplex and demultiplex up to eight binary/text streams with a single multiplexer or demultiplexer. Each chunk of data is prepended with a five bytes header, including channel id and payload length.
| 1 byte (Channel ID) | 4 bytes (Payload length) | Original payload of variable length | |---------------------|--------------------------|-------------------------------------|
Installation
npm install mux-demux-stream
Usage
The module can be used both with a "simplex" syntax and with a "duplex" syntax that offers some syntactic sugar over the simplex variant.
The simplex syntax is used for multiplexing several readable streams into a single writable stream, or demultiplexing several writable streams into a single readable stream.
The duplex syntax is more compact when for example implementing a protocol like JSON RPC 2.0 in a peer-to-peer fashion, where each RPC node consist of a server and a client that share a common bidirectional channel such as WebSockets. (See json-rpc-server-stream and json-rpc-client-stream for a more comprehensive discussion about using JSON RPC 2.0 in a peer-to-peer fashion.)
Simplex syntax
Require module and specific functions.
var mux = require('mux-demux-stream').mux;
var demux = require('mux-demux-stream').demux;
mux(sources, destination)
Combine multiple streams to allow transmission over a single stream.
var sourceA = createReadableStreamSomehow();
var sourceB = createReadableStreamSomehow();
var destination = createWritableStreamSomehow();
mux([sourceA, sourceB], destination);
demux(source, destinations)
Reconstruct the original streams from the data received from a shared stream.
var source = createReadableStreamSomehow();
var destinationA = createWritableStreamSomehow();
var destinationB = createWritableStreamSomehow();
demux(source, [destinationA, destinationB]);
Duplex syntax
Require module. (Note that this is not the same mux
function as in the example
above.)
var mux = require('mux-demux-stream');
mux(channel1[, ...]).pipe(sharedChannel).demux(channel1[, ...])
Internally the duplex variant uses "chaining" and closures to form a natural stream syntax when several duplex streams are multiplexed into and from a shared channel stream.
The following simplex syntax:
mux([localClientStream, localServerStream], sharedChannel);
demux(sharedChannel, [localClientStream, localServerStream]);
is equivalent to the following duplex syntax:
mux(localClientStream, localServerStream)
.pipe(sharedChannel)
.demux(localClientStream, localServerStream);
Test
Run unit tests:
npm test