Getting Started

Follow the Installation instructions below to create your environment for developing SWIM applications.

Refer to the SWIM developer site for an overview of SWIM concepts.

We highly recommend that you go through at LEAST the basics tutorial to see how these concepts manifest themselves in a real SWIM application.

Installation

Prerequisites

• Install JDK 8. Ensure that your JAVA_HOME environment variable is pointed to the Java 8 installation location. Ensure that your PATH includes $JAVA_HOME.

• Refer to the sample build.gradle for reference. You may use this build.gradle for all your applications.

• To build the application execute the command ./gradlew build from a shell pointed to the application's home directory. This will create a .zip and a .tar in APP_HOME/build/distributions directory. Unpackage the .zip or the .tar file. The unpackaged contents will contain a bin/ directory which contains scripts that can be used to run the application.

  user@machine:~$ ./gradlew run

• Alternatively, if you don't mind running through the Gradle VM, execute the command ./gradlew run. This will both build and run the application.

  user@machine:~$ ./gradlew run

Creating Your Own SWIM Application

SWIM is an eventually consistent, real-time, distributed object system. The building blocks of a SWIM server are Services, Lanes, Links, and a single Plane, where

• Services are objects
• Lanes are the fields and methods, of Services
• Links are references to Lanes in Services
• The Plane is a collection of Service definitions.

Public Services and Lanes form a SWIM API (streaming API over web-sockets).

We again refer you to the [SWIM developer site](SWIM developer site for a detailed overview of these SWIM concepts.

There are just three steps to build a SWIM Application.

1. Write SWIM Services with appropriate Lane declarations and configurations
2. Define a Plane with all ServiceType fields appropriately declared and all desired configurations loaded
3. Ingest data into Lanes using commands or Downlinks, via either a SwimClient instance or an external program

That's it! Services spawn lazily when a URI associated with a Service or Lane instance is invoked for the first time, so SWIM Services will process data immediately upon its availability without requiring their explicit instantiation.

Visit the following tutorials to see concrete applications built through these steps.

• Basics
• Joins