content/mina-project/userguide/ch2-basics/ch2.1-application-architecture.mdtext

Title: 2.1 - Application Architecture
NavPrev: ch2-basics.html
NavPrevText: Chapter 2 - Basics
NavUp: ch2-basics.html
NavUpText: Chapter 2 - Basics
NavNext: ch2.2-sample-tcp-server.html
NavNextText: 2.2 - Sample TCP Server
Notice:    Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one
           or more contributor license agreements.  See the NOTICE file
           distributed with this work for additional information
           regarding copyright ownership.  The ASF licenses this file
           to you under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the
           "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance
           with the License.  You may obtain a copy of the License at
           .
             http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
           .
           Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing,
           software distributed under the License is distributed on an
           "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY
           KIND, either express or implied.  See the License for the
           specific language governing permissions and limitations
           under the License.

* [2.1.1 - Server Architecture](ch2.1.1-server-architecture.html)
* [2.1.2 - Client Architecture](ch2.1.2-client-architecture.html)

#2.1 -  MINA based Application Architecture

It's the question most asked : 'How does a **MINA** based application look like'? In this article lets see what's the architecture of MINA based application. Have tried to gather the information from presentations based on **MINA**.

A Bird's Eye View :

![](../../../staticresources/images/mina/apparch_small.png)

Here, we can see that **MINA** is the glue between your application (be it a client or a server) and the underlying network layer, which can be based on TCP, UDP, in-VM comunication or even a RS-232C serial protocol for a client.

You just have to design your application on top of MINA without having to handle all the complexity of the newtork layer.

Lets take a deeper dive into the details now. The following image shows a bit more the internal of **MINA**, and what are each of the **MINA** components doing :

![](../../../staticresources/images/mina/mina_app_arch.png)

(The image is from Emmanuel Lécharny presentation [MINA in real life (ApacheCon EU 2009)](../../../staticresources/pdfs/Mina_in_real_life_ASEU-2009.pdf))

Broadly, MINA based applications are divided into 3 layers

* I/O Service - Performs actual I/O
* I/O Filter Chain - Filters/Transforms bytes into desired Data Structures and vice-versa
* I/O Handler - Here resides the actual business logic

So, in order to create a MINA based Application, you have to :

1. Create an I/O service - Choose from already available Services (*Acceptor) or create your own
2. Create a Filter Chain - Choose from already existing Filters or create a custom Filter for transforming request/response
3. Create an I/O Handler - Write business logic, on handling different messages

This is pretty much it. 

You can get a bit deeper by reading those two pages :

* [2.1.1 - Server Architecture](ch2.2.1-server-architecture.html)
* [2.2.2 - Client Architecture](ch2.2.2-client-architecture.html)

Of course, **MINA** offers more than just that, and you will robably have to take care of many oher aspects, like the messages encoding/decoding, the network configuration how to scale up, etc... We will have a further look at those aspects in the next chapters.