On 07/15/2012 02:56 PM, Arturo Filastò wrote:
I would like to follow up on the discussion we had in Florence on some design choices behind OONIB.
In particular the most controversy was around using HTTP or rsync.
[...]
# What properties we would like it to have note: these are not ordered.
Efficient even over high latency networks.
Ease of integration for third party developers.
Expandable to support requirements of new tests we develop.
Anonymous
Secure
Even though you will probably not end up using this, it may be a good idea to know that it exists:
ZeroC Ice - http://www.zeroc.com/ice.html
It's a middleware platform for building exactly this kind of distributed services. Many supported languages (C++/Python/Ruby/Java/...) and OSes (Mac/Lin/Win/Android/...)
It might seem difficult or "enterprisey", but it's simple for simple things (like RPC) and complicated only when you want complicated things (have look at demo programs).
It can optionally use TLS, interface definition for RPC and structures is written only once (each language binding then loads it and maps it to native object of its own as "usual" method calls or attributes).
Advanced features include asynchronous calls, at-most-once semantics (it can retry RPC call for methods that are marked "idempotent", i.e. whose multiple invocation is same as one invocation), persistence via Ice Freeze (might work for the file storage, not sure how big are your files, internally it's implemented on top of BerkeleyDB), forward/backward compatibility among versions of your API (up to a limit)...
Disadvantages:
- you'll have one more library blob to carry around (though Ice is in default Debian/Ubuntu repos and official RPM repos are available; core lib is about 3MB large) - GPL licensed (might conflict with other libraries' licenses) - certainly not as simple as GET/POST request
It's probably the most sane "generic" middleware/RPC platform I've seen and I've worked with a bunch of them - RESTful APIs, variants of XML-RPC, monsters like webservices/SOAP and CORBA (it always starts with "I just need this simple thing" and ends with "how do I hack this onto the existing API so that old clients end existing infrastructure won't break?")
Ondrej