[MINA] Unbound streams

[Jose Alberto Fernandez]

Hi I have been thinking about the different solutions we have for Streams and really none of them really convince me. They all require that one pre-computes the size of the stream before you send anything, which means in most cases in memory buffering. This means that for example, to send a Serialized object, one need to serialize it into a buffer and then send it prefixed by the size.   One alternative to this would be to define a small protocol that can be used to encapsulate an unbound stream in the middle of a transmission. Something like:   1)       Sender transmits as part of its protocol a BEGIN_STREAM(<end-mark>) header. <end-mark> is a sequence guaranteed not to be part of the following stream content. 2)       Receiver has installed a filter that detects the BEGIN_STREAM header and provides the receiver with an InputStream instance to be consumed (by a separate thread, perhaps). 3)       Sender commences transmition of the stream content and ends with <end-mark>. 4)       Receiver’s filter sends all input via the InputStream instance until it recognizes <end-mark> and closes the stream at that point. 5)       Any further inputs sent/received will be processed in the regular manner.   You can see this is inspired on UNIX’s “<< EOF” shell syntax. This will allow us to use, for example, regular object serialization without the need for buffering. I do not think it should be too difficult to come up with some natural <end-mark> given the particular nature of the stream.   What do you all think? How feasible is to do this in MINA?   Jose Alberto