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

Wed May 30 04:04:38 EDT 2018

On Tue, May 29, 2018 at 8:49 PM, Adrian Nistor <anistor at redhat.com> wrote:

> Vittorio, a few remarks regarding your statement "...The alternative to
> this is to develop a protostream equivalent for each supported language and
> it doesn't seem really feasible to me."
>
> No way! That's a big misunderstanding. We do not need to re-implement the
> protostream library in C/C++/C# or any new supported language.
> Protostream is just for Java and it is compatible with Google's protobuf
> lib we already use in the other clients. We can continue using Google's
> protobuf lib for these clients, with or without gRPC.
>

this is a solution that we could explore

> Protostream does not handle protobuf services as gRPC does, but we can add
> support for that with little effort.
>
> The real problem here is if we want to replace our hot rod invocation
> protocol with gRPC to save on the effort of implementing and maintaining
> hot rod in all those clients. I wonder why the obvious question is being
> avoided in this thread.
>
> Adrian
>
>
> On 05/29/2018 03:45 PM, Vittorio Rigamonti wrote:
>
> 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>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
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>>
>>
>>
>
>
> --
>
> Vittorio Rigamonti
>
> Senior Software Engineer
>
> Red Hat
>
> <https://www.redhat.com>
>
> Milan, Italy
>
> vrigamon at redhat.com
>
> irc: rigazilla
> <https://red.ht/sig>
>
>
>

-- 

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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