[infinispan-dev] Hot Rod encoding

[Galder Zamarreño]

I like the idea of pluggable serialization/marshalling, but as you rightly explained, what flexibility gives you you lose by lack of functionality. E.g. querying is only available for protostream based encoding.

So, I think we need to remove the hard bind between functionality and encoding to be able to have a trully pluggable encoding mechanism.

Cheers,
--
Galder Zamarreño
Infinispan, Red Hat

> On 3 Feb 2016, at 11:38, Gustavo Fernandes <gustavo at infinispan.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On Mon, Jan 25, 2016 at 2:03 PM, Galder Zamarreño <galder at redhat.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> As I write the Javascript client for Hot Rod, and Vittorio writes the C++ client, the question the encoding of the byte arrays has popped up.
> 
> The reason why encoding matters is mainly because of compatibility mode. How does a Hot Rod client know how it should transform something a REST client set?
> 
> To be able to answer this question correctly, the Hot Rod client needs to know the type of the data.
> 
> Although we could consider adding encoding information to the Hot Rod protocol long term, in the short term this question might already been answered by Protostream.
> 
> 
> Compatibility between disparate clients should certainly be supported, but what about a pluggable marshaller mechanism? Let's consider all usage scenarios:
> 
> * Only Java clients: in most cases, JBoss marshalling is adequate, no need to involve protobuf or json and since JBoss Marshalling is default, no need to configure anything.
> 
> * Mix of Java and C++/C#/Python clients: the Protobuf encoding works wonderfully for that. The client could be configured to use the protostream marshaller, the same for the server.
> 
> * Mix of Java, C++/C#/Python and REST clients: protobuf with json [1] encoding is an interesting option. Same as above, a protostream marshaller with json support could 
> be configured both on client and server.
> 
> * Custom marshallers: consider FlatBuffers [2], for example, an interesting new cross-platform serializer that allows to access serialized data without de-serializing the whole payload, 
> and without generating any transient memory, and it optionally supports JSON. It could be interesting to write a marshaller based on it and plug it on Infinispan.
> 
> Although we have a way of configuring the marshaller on client (via RemoteCacheManager) and server (deployable jar), there'd be more work to do in order make them really pluggable:
> 
> - Some serialization formats like Protobuf and [2] require interface description to be available on both client and server. This is not supported for all marshallers, just for Protostream
> - Remote query requires some metadata regarding which fields to index and how, and this would need to be possible on every language regardless of the marshalling.
> Currently, this info can be encoded in the .proto file only, a custom marshaller would not work.
> - Currently remote query is settled on protobuf not only for the byte array but for the the HotRod query request and response [3]
> 
> Is having a pluggable serializer mechanism too far fetched, given the effort already invested towards protobuf? 
> 
> Gustavo
> 
> [1] https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/proto3#json
> [2] https://google.github.io/flatbuffers/
> [2] https://code.facebook.com/posts/872547912839369/improving-facebook-s-performance-on-android-with-flatbuffers/
> [3] https://github.com/infinispan/infinispan/blob/master/remote-query/remote-query-client/src/main/resources/org/infinispan/query/remote/client/query.proto 
> 
> 
> 
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