[infinispan-dev] Remote Query improvements

[Tristan Tarrant]

Hi everybody,

last week I developed a simple application using Remote Query, and ran 
into a few issues. Some of them are just technical hurdles, while others 
have to do with the complexity of the developer experience. Here they 
are for open discussion:

- the schemas registry should be persistent. Alternatively being able to 
either specify the ProtoBuf schema from the <indexing /> configuration 
in the server subsystem or use server's deployment processor to "deploy" 
schemas.
- the server should store the single protobuf source schemas to allow 
for easy inspection/update of each using our management tools. The 
server itself should then compile the protobuf schemas into the binary 
representation when any of the source schemas changes. This would 
require a Java implementation of the ProtoBuf schema compiler, which 
wouldn't probably be too hard to do with Antlr.
- we need to be able to annotate single protobuf fields for indexing 
(probably by using specially-formatted comments, a la doclets) to avoid 
indexing all of the fields
- since remote query is already imbued with JPA in some form, an 
interesting project would be to implement a JPA annotation processor 
which can produce a set of ProtoBuf schemas from JPA-annotated classes.
- on top of the above, a ProtoBuf marshaller/unmarshaller which can use 
the JPA entities directly.

Tristan