Sonatribe conversations platform - CQRS knockout - part 2: GetEventStore.com

Following on from part 1 (CQRS Journey) this is my implementation spike using GetEventStore. Assesing which CQRS setup we should use at sonatribe for the new conversations feature.

The code can be found here.

This implementation is quite a bit different so I'll discuss where they branch off from each other and maybe try and figure out the pros and cons.

Using EventStore as the persistence mechanism for storing event streams takes a lot of faff out of the process. For instance if you don't want to you don't need to have any service bus sitting between the API -> domain service and read model. However - EventStore is a more lower level technology and because of that you don't get so much out of the box as you do with CQRS Journey.

With this implementation I decided to keep the domain service in a separate process at the other end of a RabbitMQ queue. So - looking at the API you won't see a huge amount of difference in terms of complexity (except maybe RMQ is heaps simpler to get up and running).

Moving on from there I have a  console app (as opposed to a worker role) running with TopShelf (for easy promotion to Windows Service when required). The code for this is here: https://github.com/wayne-o/ges-tryout/blob/master/src/Conversations.DomainService/Program.cs. Really simple way of wiring up the command handlers using Castle Windsor.

Looking at the one and only command handler: https://github.com/wayne-o/ges-tryout/blob/master/src/Conversations/Commands/CreateNewConversationCommandHandler.cs you can see how easy it is to save an aggregate root into the event store using the GetEventStoreRepository. This was one area that the developer is left to figure out - finding this repository was a great help.

You can see in the AR that when I create a new conversation it fires a new ConversationStarted event. This event is listened to in the read model. The wiring up for the read model you can see here: https://github.com/wayne-o/ges-tryout/blob/master/src/Ges.ReadModel/Program.cs. Again - there is some work to do here to turn the received events into something that can be worked with. There is also some (overly simple) code here to dispatch the events to the event handlers.

Inside the event handlers I am denormalizing the data to a RavenDb read model.

Aside from the added work of figuring out the event dispatcher I find the GES architecture much much simpler than the Azure based CQRS Journey code. There seems to be much less ceremony - even after I reduced it drastically in my refactoring of CQRS Journey. I haven't got any perf details for either implementation but Greg claims GES will natively handle 20,000 messages a second on a single node so I doubt perf is an issue for either implementation.

Next up I'll be adding some real features using each of these infrastructures. I like to work from an emergent design BDD style approach so will be looking at which of these works best under a test 1st dev cycle.

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