Minimalistic Asynchronous framework

Minimalistic Asynchronous: Small framework for asynchronous java application.

MiA has been designed to ease the creation of applications such as front or middle servers that communicate over a network and requires to be Asynchronous and rely on state machines.

MiA is event-driven and relies on Netty for asynchronous networking operations. It features a tasking system which uses @FunctionalInterface and Futures to manage asynchronous operations.

MiA Event handling

In a way, MiA event handling resembles the ExecutorService interface provided by java as it relies on the use of Callable and Future. But there are fundamental differences that justify that we do not use java executors and the ExecutorService interface. In MiA this is called the ExecutionStage interface.

Improvements brought by ExecutionStage:

1. Real-time: MiA provides a TimeLimit argument to contrain the execution of Callable delegated to an ExecutionStage.
2. CompletableFuture: java base interface Future<V> does not support any callback mechanism on completion. This is added by CompletableFuture or by io.netty.util.concurrent.Future<T>. That's why MiA requires these higher-level implementations of Future at its interface level.

These improvements are offered through the method CompletableFuture<R> callBefore(TimeLimit limit, Callable<R> callable)

To make asynchronism more comprehensive, MiA provides 3 levels of ExecutionStage.

1. Task: A Task is a Thread. It's the single point of synchronization that you'll use to avoid any synchronization issues.
2. Terminal: The terminal is a sub-task which is executed by the Thread of its parent Task. Why is it called Terminal? A Terminal should hold a termination point to something like a Socket, a File, a database connection... If a termination point generates events then we'll handle them on the corresponding Terminal.
3. State: A state can be either a TerminalState or a TaskState. It's used to handle events only when the state is active. Otherwise, the state will reject the execution of the event with an InactiveStateException.

This 3 stage design fits most cases you could find when implementing server-based applications.

See http2-server sample for an example of 3 stage design with MiA.