[infinispan-dev] Infinispan client/server architecture based on gRPC

[Vittorio Rigamonti]

Thanks Adrian,

of course there's a marshalling work under the cover and that is reflected
into the generated code (specially the accessor methods generated from the
oneof clause).

My opinion is that on the client side this could be accepted, as long as
the API are well defined and documented: application developer can build an
adhoc decorator on the top if needed. The alternative to this is to develop
a protostream equivalent for each supported language and it doesn't seem
really feasible to me.

On the server side (java only) the situation is different: protobuf is
optimized for streaming not for storing so probably a Protostream layer is
needed.

On Mon, May 28, 2018 at 4:47 PM, Adrian Nistor <anistor at redhat.com> wrote:

> Hi Vittorio,
> thanks for exploring gRPC. It seems like a very elegant solution for
> exposing services. I'll have a look at your PoC soon.
>
> I feel there are some remarks that need to be made regarding gRPC. gRPC is
> just some nice cheesy topping on top of protobuf. Google's implementation
> of protobuf, to be more precise.
> It does not need handwritten marshallers, but the 'No need for marshaller'
> does not accurately describe it. Marshallers are needed and are generated
> under the cover by the library and so are the data objects and you are
> unfortunately forced to use them. That's both the good news and the bad
> news:) The whole thing looks very promising and friendly for many uses
> cases, especially for demos and PoCs :))). Nobody wants to write those
> marshallers. But it starts to become a nuisance if you want to use your own
> data objects.
> There is also the ugliness and excessive memory footprint of the generated
> code, which is the reason Infinispan did not adopt the protobuf-java
> library although it did adopt protobuf as an encoding format.
> The Protostream library was created as an alternative implementation to
> solve the aforementioned problems with the generated code. It solves this
> by letting the user provide their own data objects. And for the marshallers
> it gives you two options: a) write the marshaller yourself (hated), b)
> annotated your data objects and the marshaller gets generated (loved).
> Protostream does not currently support service definitions right now but
> this is something I started to investigate recently after Galder asked me
> if I think it's doable. I think I'll only find out after I do it:)
>
> Adrian
>
>
> On 05/28/2018 04:15 PM, Vittorio Rigamonti wrote:
>
> Hi Infinispan developers,
>
> I'm working on a solution for developers who need to access Infinispan
> services  through different programming languages.
>
> The focus is not on developing a full featured client, but rather discover
> the value and the limits of this approach.
>
> - is it possible to automatically generate useful clients in different
> languages?
> - can that clients interoperate on the same cache with the same data types?
>
> I came out with a small prototype that I would like to submit to you and
> on which I would like to gather your impressions.
>
>  You can found the project here [1]: is a gRPC-based client/server
> architecture for Infinispan based on and EmbeddedCache, with very few
> features exposed atm.
>
> Currently the project is nothing more than a poc with the following
> interesting features:
>
> - client can be generated in all the grpc supported language: java, go,
> c++ examples are provided;
> - the interface is full typed. No need for marshaller and clients build in
> different language can cooperate on the same cache;
>
> The second item is my preferred one beacuse it frees the developer from
> data marshalling.
>
> What do you think about?
> Sounds interesting?
> Can you see any flaw?
>
> There's also a list of issues for the future [2], basically I would like
> to investigate these questions:
> How far this architecture can go?
> Topology, events, queries... how many of the Infinispan features can be
> fit in a grpc architecture?
>
> Thank you
> Vittorio
>
> [1] https://github.com/rigazilla/ispn-grpc
> [2] https://github.com/rigazilla/ispn-grpc/issues
>
> --
>
> Vittorio Rigamonti
>
> Senior Software Engineer
>
> Red Hat
>
> <https://www.redhat.com>
>
> Milan, Italy
>
> vrigamon at redhat.com
>
> irc: rigazilla
> <https://red.ht/sig>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> infinispan-dev mailing listinfinispan-dev at lists.jboss.orghttps://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/infinispan-dev
>
>
>


-- 

Vittorio Rigamonti

Senior Software Engineer

Red Hat

<https://www.redhat.com>

Milan, Italy

vrigamon at redhat.com

irc: rigazilla
<https://red.ht/sig>
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