[jboss-as7-dev] DMR GWT Prototype

[Heiko Braun]

Can you think of any browser incompatibilities with the Base64 approach?

Ike

On Feb 10, 2011, at 7:08 AM, Jason T. Greene wrote:

> I was able to port DMR so that it can be used with GWT to send and 
> receive DMR's native externalized binary format via client-side javascript.
> 
> https://github.com/n1hility/jboss-as/tree/detyped2
> 
> A pure binary protocol is not possible in all browsers, so the 
> implementation has to base64 encode the stream.
> 
> The main advantage to this approach is that there is essentially no loss 
> of information (all type info is preserved), and the API works very well 
> at dynamic access and is exactly the same as the management API used in 
> server code. In addition parsing requests on the server is much more 
> efficient since there is less transformation and pattern matching. 
> Lastly it has the potential to be much more space efficient.
> 
> However, due to Javascript's very poor binary handling, lack of 
> streaming, and lack of native floating point encoding, client side 
> execution is on average 2x+ slower than directly evaling JSON code. That 
> said, processing a dump of the entire model took on average 9ms (in 
> webkit based browsers), and in the worst case (firefox) took 20ms. So 
> the times are still somewhat reasonable.
> 
> In addition to being faster on the client side, eval'd JSON does not 
> require maintaining the DMR API. On the other hand JSON usage in GWT is 
> clumsy if you aren't using overlay types, and overlay types are not 
> helpful to dynamic client code (dynamic as in being able to discover and 
> manage resources based on resource descriptions as opposed to static code).
> 
> Lastly, JSON output, by its nature, loses type information. Although 
> this could be worked around if it's a problem by adding type identifiers 
> to all node values, at the cost of looking less JSON like (extra verbose).
> 
> So ultimately it's up to everyone working on the console as to which 
> direction this goes. I can easily support both mechanisms on the server.
> 
> -- 
> Jason T. Greene
> JBoss, a division of Red Hat
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