Magic Bus returns

During my first stint at ThoughtWorks, I paired with Gregor Hohpe on implementing messaging patterns while he worked with Bobby Woolf on Enterprise Integration Patterns (EIP). To this day, this remains one of my favorite technical books. In conversation I was always struck by Gregor's meticulous "napkin diagrams" as he illustrated the point he was making.

One output from that pairing was to experiment with using messaging patterns within a single program, not just between programs. So I wrote the "Magic Bus" library in Java, using reflection, to connect publishing and subscribing components within a web services backend.

While working a new project, I find myself diagramming one of our backend services using EIP's notations for messaging patterns. And I recalled "Magic Bus".

I thought I had long ago lost the source code, but found some JVM .class files in a forgotten directory. IntelliJ to the rescue! Using JetBrain's excellent Fernflower decompiler, I recovered a later stage of "Magic Bus" after I had converted it to typesafer generics and dropped reflection.

That code is now in public GitHub, brought up to Java 11, and cleaned up.

If I recall correctly, I originally dropped "Magic Bus" after Guava's Event Bus came along. What makes "Magic Bus" different from Event Bus? Not too much, actually. The main feature in "Magic Bus" lacking in Event Bus is subscribing to message handler exceptions: in Guava one instead registers a global callback to handle exceptions.