Distributed System Simulator

The Distributed System Simulator is a lightweight Go application designed to simulate a set of nodes in a distributed system. This project showcases key concepts in Go, such as concurrency with goroutines, thread-safe data access with mutexes, and HTTP server setup with basic RESTful endpoints.

Key Features

• HTTP Server: The application creates an HTTP server with endpoints for retrieving node data and providing a welcome message.
• Concurrency with Goroutines: A goroutine periodically updates a random node to simulate a distributed system's behavior.
• Thread-Safe Data Access: The code uses sync.RWMutex to ensure thread-safe operations when accessing shared data.
• Error Handling: Proper error handling with appropriate HTTP status codes and log messages.
• Unit Tests: Comprehensive unit tests to validate the behavior of key functions, including GetNodeData, RootHandler, and UpdateNode.

Core Logic

The core logic of the application revolves around simulating a set of nodes in a distributed system and providing HTTP endpoints to interact with them. Here's a brief overview of how it works:

• Node Data Structure: The NodeData struct represents a node with fields for ID, Name, Value, and Time.
• Initialization: The InitNodes function initializes a slice of nodes with random data.
• HTTP Endpoints:
  • /nodes: Returns the current state of all nodes in JSON format.
  • /: Provides a welcome message with instructions for users.
• Concurrency: A goroutine periodically updates a random node's data every 5 seconds, demonstrating concurrency.
• Synchronization: The code uses sync.RWMutex to ensure thread-safe operations, and sync.WaitGroup to manage goroutine synchronization.

Technologies Used

• Go (Golang): The primary programming language used for building the application.
• Net/HTTP: Used to create the HTTP server and define HTTP handlers.
• Sync Package: Provides synchronization primitives such as RWMutex and WaitGroup.
• Encoding/JSON: For converting data to and from JSON format.
• Testing Package: Used to implement unit tests for critical functions.

Getting Started

To run the Distributed System Simulator locally, follow these steps:

1. Clone the repository: git clone <your-repo-url>
2. Navigate to the project directory: cd <your-project-directory>
3. Start the application: go run <your-go-file>.go
4. Open your browser and visit http://localhost:8080/ for the welcome message and http://localhost:8080/nodes to get the node data.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! If you find any issues or have suggestions for improvements, please open an issue or submit a pull request. Be sure to follow the existing code style and write appropriate tests for any new functionality.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. For more information, see the LICENSE file.

Acknowledgments

• Go Documentation: A comprehensive resource for learning Go and its standard library.
• Open-Source Community: For providing resources and platforms that enable collaborative projects.