Message Queue

NATS — start here. The substrate: subjects and wildcards, pub/sub against request/reply, queue groups, and streams. Every name below is a NATS name, and the patterns below are ones this substrate already provides.

ores.nats — the library that wraps it: what a call site looks like, the shared configuration knobs, and the request/reply helpers. Read second, because it is the concrete form the substrate takes in this codebase.

ORE Studio Messaging Reference — the namespace map: which component owns which subjects, and the rule that no subject is ownerless. Read this before writing a subject, because a subject in the wrong namespace is served by the wrong service and nothing reports it.

NATS Entity Protocol Specification — the centre of the cluster. The subject grammar, the eight verbs, the request and response envelopes, the write model that keeps server-owned fields off the wire, the error model, the event contract, and the security rules. Read it before writing any message; it is the page the rest of the cluster defers to.

NATS Wire Format — the seam the specification assumes rather than restates: the envelope against the payload, and the process-wide encoding choice. Read straight after, because it is what says which bytes are the message and which are not.

Polymorphic types over NATS — one subject per concrete type, and why a variant is never carried as an untyped blob. Read when a message has to carry more than one shape, which is exactly when a shortcut is tempting.

Optimistic Concurrency Versioning — what the version on a write actually asserts, who owns it, and why an integer must not double as a mode. Read before implementing a write path; the failure it prevents is a silent overwrite.

History Diff Architecture — presenting one version against its predecessor. Read after the version page, because it presumes the version is the database's to assign and not the caller's to claim.

Anatomy of a Service — the layers, where the registrar sits, and the error contract, with the stand-up checklist. Read when you are building or repairing a service rather than a message.

Entity-composed registrars — how subjects become handlers, one entity at a time. Read straight after the anatomy page: it is the mechanism that page names.

Service Bootstrap Phases — when a subject becomes callable, and the ordering that follows for anything that calls back into its own service. Read last of the three, because it only bites once subscriptions exist.

Where should an entity-mirror cache live? — the placement of a cache fed by events rather than by reads. Read when a consumer keeps state instead of answering requests, which is a different problem from every page above it.

NATS certificates — generation, TLS layout, and container deployment. Not part of the message story; reach for it when the question is securing or deploying the bus rather than speaking on it.