Event Store Projections By Example

I’ve spent some time recently exploring Event Store Projections written in JavaScript. Since there isn’t a lot of documentation yet, I’ll be publishing my findings in a series of blog posts.

Event Store Projections

Event Store is an open-source functional database that stores data as a series of immutable events. The concept isn’t new: logs have been used to store data in this exact fashion for decades, but it’s still garnered much attention from the DDD community in the past few years, especially from people implementing CQRS+ES. Event Store Projections allow us to process events, filter events, and even produce new events, features we can leverage for event processing in systems based on Event-Driven Architecture.

Why JavaScript?

Although it’s possible to write projections in any language, Event Store supports JavaScript natively. This means we don’t have to rely on external programs to process our projections if we write them in JavaScript, and we don’t have to manage their progress and state manually.

I used to hate having to deal with JavaScript; in most projects where I’ve seen it used, it’s an absolute mess. But the language has matured in the past few years: now we have test frameworks, design patterns, and guidelines to work with. Thanks to these tools, I’ve actually learned to like programming in JavaScript.

Examples

In the following posts, I provide examples of solutions to real-world problems I’ve faced using JavaScript and Event Store Projections. These include developing maintainable and testable code, filtering data, and calculating averages. Here are the topics I intend to write about in the future:

1. EventStore Client API Basics (C#)
2. Counting events of a specific type
3. Partition events based on data found in previous events
4. Calculating an average per day
5. The irresponsible gambler
6. Distribute events to other streams
7. Temporal Projection to generate alarms
8. Projection in C#

Source code

The source for these examples can be found on github:

https://github.com/tim-cools/EventStore-Examples

Be sure to read the README file first.

More Event Store Projections documentation

1. Official Wiki
2. Greg Young’s Blog
3. Rob Ashton’s Blog