Architecture Overview

Ultimately behind-the-scenes ServiceStack is just built on top of Raw ASP.NET IHttpHandler's. Existing abstractions and xmlconfig-encumbered legacy ASP.NET providers have been abandoned, in favour of fresh, simple and clean Caching, Session and Authentication providers all based on clean POCOs, supporting multiple back-ends and all working seamlessly with each other. Our best-practices architecture is purposely kept simple, introduces no new concepts or artificial constructs and can all be eloquently captured in the diagram below:

Server Architecture

Client Architecture

ServiceStack's Message-based design allows us to easily support typed, generic and re-usable Service Clients for all our popular formats:

Having all clients share the same interface allow them to be hot-swappable at run-time without code changes and keep them highly testable where the same unit test can also serve as an XML, JSON, JSV, SOAP Integration Test.

By promoting clean (endpoint-ignorant and dependency-free) Service and DTO classes, your web services are instantly re-usable and can be hosted in non-http contexts as well. E.g. The client architecture when one of the built-in MQ Host is enabled: