For eg Thrift will definitely not help in the messages that we use for the membership protocol. Because there we need to control how big the serialized messages are - we make sure we serialize a part of the object such that it fits into an ethernet MTU packet. We do this so that we don't get bitten by UDP fragmentation. I don't think you could do operations like that in Thrift based serialization mechanism. We need more control over the serialization mechanism.
So I don't know if this is something that is insanely important in any capacity in my opinion. I am sure there are bunch of other reasons I can come up with - we went through this exercise 2 year back. Of course if you want to investigate the efficacy I can't stop you from doing so :). Avinash On Sat, Mar 28, 2009 at 9:48 AM, Jonathan Ellis <jbel...@gmail.com> wrote: > One point of clarification -- I don't understand why looking up by > string is better than using an enum, for instance. java will autobox > enums for use in a hashmap lookup. > > On Sat, Mar 28, 2009 at 10:34 AM, Avinash Lakshman > <avinash.laksh...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Why is it ad-hoc? And it uses a factory pattern and I don't think it hard > > once you get a hang of it. Consumers of the system are not even going to > > know about these details. Personally I am never a fan of fixing anything > > that is not broken - in this case it has been working really well for us. > > This is now just a matter of what one might prefer. Thrift is something > that > > I would not like to see anywhere apart from the entry point. With regards > to > > the using the string to lookup the handlers it was done because if you > don't > > do that then you will have to resort to RPC style instead of message > passing > > or find the handlers based on the kind of messages i.e if-else branching. > We > > use non-blocking I/O for all our internal messaging and Thrift using > > blocking I/O. There is big difference in throughput and also Thrift > > non-blocking I/O from what I hear is horrendous in performance and > > stability. My friend you don't have my vote for this :). > > Avinash > > > > On Sat, Mar 28, 2009 at 8:11 AM, Jonathan Ellis <jbel...@gmail.com> > wrote: > > > >> we have a Message class that mostly represents a bunch of bytes (but > >> sometimes does not, which in some cases causes bugs) and a bunch of > >> other *Message classes that are not Message subclasses but generate > >> Message objects (so you have the amusingly redundant Message message = > >> readResponseMessage.makeReadResponseMessage() in places). > >> > >> I think we can replace these ad-hoc and tedious-to-write Message > >> factories with generated thrift code. Thrift is good at this and > >> efficient (currently our message identifiers are inefficient strings > >> like "ROW-READ-VERB-HANDLER"). > >> > >> Any objections to investigating replacing the hand-coded messages with > >> thrift? > >> > > >
