Executor

Executor represents a processing component in a Jina Flow. It performs a single task on a Document or DocumentArray.

You can create an Executor by extending the Executor class and adding logic to endpoint methods.

See Also

Document, Executor, and Flow are the three fundamental concepts in Jina.

  • Document is the basic data type in Jina;

  • Executor is how Jina processes Documents;

  • Flow is how Jina streamlines and scales Executors.

Design Principle of Executor

Executor - 图1

Executor - 图2

In Jina 2.0 the Executor class is generic to all categories of executors (encoders, indexers, segmenters,…) to keep development simple. We do not provide subclasses of Executor that are specific to each category. The design principles are (user here means “Executor developer”):

  • Do not surprise the user: keep Executor class as Pythonic as possible. It should be as light and unintrusive as a mixin class:

    • do not customize the class constructor logic;

    • do not change its built-in interfaces __getstate__, __setstate__;

    • do not add new members to the Executor object unless needed.

  • Do not overpromise to the user: do not promise features that we can hardly deliver. Trying to control the interface while delivering just loosely-implemented features is bad for scaling the core framework. For example, save, load, on_gpu, etc.

We want to give our users the freedom to customize their executors easily. If a user is a good Python programmer, they should pick up Executor in no time. It is as simple as subclassing Executor and adding an endpoint.