Architecture overview
Ultimately behind-the-scenes ServiceStack is just built on top of a set of Raw ASP.NET IHttpHandler's. The entry point for all ASP.NET and HttpListener requests is in the ServiceStackHttpHandlerFactory whose purpose is to return the appropriate IHttpHandler for the incoming request.
ServiceStack's Message-based design allows us to easily support typed, generic and re-usable Service Clients for all our popular formats:
Other benefits of all clients sharing the same interface include being hot-swappable at run-time without code changes and they're highly testable where the same unit test can also serve as an XML, JSON, JSV, SOAP Integration Test.
By promoting clean, endpoint-ignorant and dependency-free Service and DTO classes, your web services are instantly re-usable and can be hosted in non-http contexts as well. e.g. This is the client architecture when a built-in MQ Host is enabled:
There are 2 distinct modes in any ServiceStack application:
- AppHost Setup and Configuration - Only done once for all services. Run only once on App StartUp.
- Runtime - Run on every request: uses dependencies, plugins, etc. defined in the AppHost. Each new request re-binds all IOC dependencies to a new service instance which gets disposed at the end of each request.
The implementation of this can be visualized below:
After the IHttpHandler is returned, it gets executed with the current ASP.NET or HttpListener request wrapped in a common IHttpRequest instance.
The implementation of RestHandler shows what happens during a typical ServiceStack request:
