From 7e0647ba4ac6f6b2a6b0f966c9747468979d2bd3 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: void <void@119.io>
Date: Thu, 21 Apr 2016 17:21:00 +0200
Subject: [PATCH] Add ARCHITECTURE.md

---
 ARCHITECTURE.md | 55 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 1 file changed, 55 insertions(+)
 create mode 100644 ARCHITECTURE.md

diff --git a/ARCHITECTURE.md b/ARCHITECTURE.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000000..5350081efb
--- /dev/null
+++ b/ARCHITECTURE.md
@@ -0,0 +1,55 @@
+methods/*
+    These files define all methods callable under
+    web3.db.*
+    web3.eth.*
+    web3.net.*
+    web3.personal.*
+    web3.shh.*
+
+    Methods and properties are first defined as a dictionary
+    and then are converted to real functions and attached to the
+    respective objects. This will make it easier to mirror the
+    next migrations of the web3.js library. Both types are defined
+    in method.py and property.py respectively.
+
+RequestManager
+    Is supplied with one Provider at initialisation which
+    can be replaced by calling setProvider(). It uses Jsonrpc
+    to convert the methods into raw payloads and to validate
+    responses attained with receive().
+    
+    Has three other methods:
+    
+    - send(data, timeout=None)
+        If timeout is None, send blocks until the result is
+        available, which it then returns.
+        
+        If the timeout is 0, send returns immediately, only
+        returning the id of the request, which can be used
+        to poll with receive() later.
+
+        If the timeout is greater than 0, it blocks until
+        either the result is available or the timeout is
+        reached, at which point a ValueError is thrown.
+        
+        send() makes use of the other two functions:
+
+    - forward(data)
+        Forwards the data to the provider and returns the
+        request id.
+    
+    - receive(requestid, timeout=0)
+        Implements the timeout functionality described in send.
+        If timeout is 0, it returns None if the response was
+        not available.
+
+Provider
+    On initialisation, is started in a separate thread.
+    Continuously fetches incoming requests from a queue
+    and appends the responses to another queue. Providers
+    only receives and returns "raw" requests, JSON validation
+    and decoding happens in the Request Manager.
+    
+    As of now there are two implementations:
+        - RPCProvider
+        - IPCProvider