Ok I definitely plan on giving the Async RPC methods a try tonight, but I figured I'd just throw out some questions before I get home to start hacking on this stuff.
The one-to-one message to RPC call Async solution will let a client send messages of any given type in my defined protocol, but how would a server respond to a client with a message that the client didn't request? For example say I was trying to write a FPS like Quake and I want to server to send position updates for all clients to all clients, how would i model that as a client RPC request for that. With the Async RPC solutions I could make a RPC call for Map<Integer, Position> getPositionUpdates(), Now say that the client needs to request 50 other messages to be notified of. I guess the solution would be to make an Async RPC call requesting those updates and respond to it when I receive it asynchronously and then reissue another Async RPC call for the next set of updates. It just seems inefficient to actively make the client request for data when the server could implicitly know that when connected on this game protocol I can just send these messages to the clients without them asking for it. Not to mention you'd have make sure you don't "miss" sending a client a message if they finished their Async call but haven't reestablished a new one. The biggest issue is that not all client request will result in a single response (like shooting a bullet, may blowup an entity, and damage all players in the area those events are seperate messages sent from the respective entities). At a game development studio I used to work at we developed a cross language IDL network protocol definition (C++, Java) very similiar to Protocol Buffers and Thrift (without some of the more mature features like being transport agnostic we explicitly built it for binary TCP socket transport, or protocol versioning), the stream of packets would contain as the first 32 bits a message ID that would be a key to a map a Message class that would have methods to read in that message type from a byte[] stream. Looking through Thrift code in the TBinaryProtocol writeMessage it looks like it's including the name of the message being sent and it's type (is the concept of Message in thrift the same as RPC?), if so what's the corresponding code pathway for the client waiting for an RPC response because if I could just use this message name or type to key into what I need to serialize off the network from both client and server end then that would be perfect. On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 1:51 PM, Ted Dunning <[email protected]> wrote: > I really think that using async service methods which are matched one to > one > with the message types that you want to send gives you exactly the > semantics > that are being requested with very simple implementation cost. > > It is important to not get toooo hung up on what RPC stands for. I use > async methods all the time to stream data structures for logging and it > works great. Moreover, it provides a really simple way of building > extractors and processors for this data since I have an interface sitting > there that will tell me about all of the methods (data types) that I need > to > handle or explicitly ignore. > > So the trick works and works really well. Give it a try! > > On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 8:23 AM, Bryan Duxbury <[email protected]> wrote: > > > Optional fields are not serialized onto the wire. There is a slight > > performance penalty at serialization time if you have a ton of unset > fields, > > but that's it. > > > > Am I over complicating things > >> > > > > Personally, sounds like it to me. Why do you need this streaming behavior > > or whatnot? Hotwiring the rpc stack to let you send any message you want > is > > going to be a ton of work and not really that much of a functionality > > improvement. > > > > -Bryan > > > > > > -- > Ted Dunning, CTO > DeepDyve >
