Casbah Architecture Overview

A Developer's Introduction to Casbah

Ken MacLeod

Surveys the major components of the Casbah system.


Table of Contents
Introduction
Casbah Components
Cairo Architecture
Cairo Black Box
Distributed Cairo

Introduction

Casbah is a lightweight, distributed environment and framework for writing applications and working with existing applications. Casbah brings together several technologies to create a cohesive environment for driving applications, storing persistant data, accessing Internet services, and running scripts in multiple languages

Casbah's unique features are it's support for many different storage systems, file types, services, and protocols all organized as a URL or Unix-like hierarchy, it's integration with multiple languages for working with the hierarchy, and it's support for Internet standards like Web formats, protocols, and XML.

Casbah is very modular. Casbah is made up of various drivers, object or application programming interfaces (APIs), external interfaces, conventions, and protocols. Components can be written in any language that can communicate with Casbah over CORBA or Casbah's own Lightweight Distributed Objects (LDO). Applications, services, clients, and servers can support different combinations of components to suit their needs.