OBSOLETE - historical interest only

https://github.com/cloudevents/sdk-go now has most of the features that lightning was aiming to provide, so this work is obsolete.

---

Lightning is a multi-protocol, multi-format library for building cloud-event sources and sinks.

What's different about lightning?

The cloud-event specification provides multiple ways to represent events: as structured JSON, or as binary content AMQP or MQTT messages for example. The set of possible formats and protocols is open-ended.

There are already libraries for sending and receiving cloud events using HTTP and JSON, but they tend to support JSON and HTTP only, with no public hooks to extend to other formats or protocols.

There are knative event sources for converting events from non-HTTP protocols to JSON/HTTP but they tend to be specific to a single non-HTTP protocol and usually only support JSON format.

Lightning does the following:

• Implements common conversions between structured and binary messages

• Manages an extendable set of Formats, automatically Marshals/Unmarshals structured events correctly based on the format media type.

• Separates the implementation Sources and Sinks. Sources and Sinks for arbitrary protocols can be mixed and matched.

Summary of packages

Package lightning provides an abstract Event, extensible Format conversions, and Source/Sink interfaces to help build adapters.

Package amqp provies AMQP sources and sinks.

Package mqtt provides an MQTT 3.1.1 sources and sinks.

Package http provides HTTP sources and sinks.