[infinispan-issues] [JBoss JIRA] Commented: (ISPN-508) ProtoBuf as portable serialization for Hot Rod

[Galder Zamarreno (JIRA)]

    [ https://jira.jboss.org/browse/ISPN-508?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=12539130#action_12539130 ] 

Galder Zamarreno commented on ISPN-508:
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I've been playing around with protobufs trying to figure out whether it could be used as a general marshalling mechanism and I don't think that's really possible. The problem with protobufs is that reading requires strongly type access to the class you're trying to deserialize, i.e. Person.parseFrom(bytes) (http://code.google.com/apis/protocolbuffers/docs/javatutorial.html). In the java world u could get around adding class name to generated bytes and then using reflection on the reading part, but this won't fly with Python or C++.

Partial incomplete solutions to this problem include using cache generic information to find out key/value types but this is not a guarantee and it's not clear to me how these would be translated to Python or C++ client impls. Protobufs also offers the possibility of using self describing messages but the API to build the read object is not available for Python (see bottom of: http://code.google.com/apis/protocolbuffers/docs/techniques.html), so this is not option in my opinion.

So, my conclusion of protobufs is that clients would need to do the work of transforming their pojos to byte[] and pass them to us, and they'd parse the the byte[] from remote cache with the knowledge of the type to be read. In this scenario, we'd offer some guidelines via a wiki or similar to anyone wanting to do this.

Next I'll check Thrift and Avro in greater detail to see if they offer a better solution than protobufs.

> ProtoBuf as portable serialization for Hot Rod
> ----------------------------------------------
>
>                 Key: ISPN-508
>                 URL: https://jira.jboss.org/browse/ISPN-508
>             Project: Infinispan
>          Issue Type: Feature Request
>          Components: Cache Server
>            Reporter: Galder Zamarreno
>            Assignee: Galder Zamarreno
>            Priority: Critical
>             Fix For: 5.0.0.BETA1, 5.0.0.Final
>
>
> Consider using Google ProtoBufs as a way to serialize data into a wire so that a single Hot Rod server can simulatneously be accessed by clients written in different languages. At the moment, cos Java client uses standard serialization, only Java clients would really be able to understand the contents of it, unless there's a non-JVM implementation that can understand java serialization. 

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