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koding/kite

★ 3,256 · Go · MIT · updated Oct 2018

Micro-service framework in Go

Kite is a Go micro-service framework built around bidirectional RPC over WebSocket/SockJS, with a central service registry (Kontrol) for discovery and JWT-based auth. It was the backbone of Koding's cloud IDE and lets services find and call each other by a hierarchical query path. Last touched in 2018, so treat it as historical reference, not something you'd start a new project on.

The bidirectional RPC model over WebSocket is genuinely interesting — clients and servers can call methods on each other, which most RPC frameworks don't handle cleanly. The dnode protocol implementation is a faithful Go port of a protocol designed for exactly this two-way case. Kontrol's hierarchical query (username/env/name/version/region/hostname/id) gives you fine-grained service addressing without needing a full orchestration layer. The kite.js counterpart means browser tabs are first-class participants in the mesh, not just consumers.

Dead since 2018 — no Go modules support, still on dep (Gopkg.toml/lock), which is a non-starter for anything modern. Kontrol requires etcd or Postgres as a backend, so your 'lightweight' micro-service framework drags in significant infrastructure before you write a single handler. The dnode wire protocol is a JavaScript-era design with callback serialization that doesn't map naturally to Go idioms and adds real debugging friction. No active maintainers, no security patches — the JWT/RSA key handling has had years of CVEs in the ecosystem with zero response here.

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