[erlang-questions] Android and Erlang Data transfer

[Anton Lavrik]

Hi Gustavo,

Based on my experience connecting remote clients with Erlang servers,
Protocol Buffers works quite well. Unless you need something special (e.g.
extra performance or extra simplicity), I would stick with it. It is a
mature and very powerful tool. Important thing -- there are a couple of
stable and well-maintained implementations of Protocol Buffers for Erlang:

https://github.com/tomas-abrahamsson/gpb
https://github.com/alavrik/piqi-erlang

basho/protobuff is a fork of a really old Protobuf implementation for
Erlang. It has a lot of limitations and issues. I wouldn't recommend it.

I am not very knowledgeable about what people use on Android. One thing I
heard that the stock Protocol Buffers for Java implementation may be a bit
too heavy for mobile clients. You may want to check this alternative
implementation: https://github.com/square/wire

For transport, I'd recommend HTTP/HTTPS. Again, unless you need something
special.

You may also want to take a look at piqi-rpc. It helps to write Erlang
servers and gives clients a choice to use Protocol Buffers, JSON or XML for
making RPC-style calls over plain HTTP (I am an author of this tool).

Anton



On Sun, Aug 24, 2014 at 10:03 PM, Gustavo Pires <devgutt@REDACTED> wrote:

> Hello everyone,
>
> What do you think I should use to transfer data between Android and an
> Erlang Server? I think a good approach would be Sockets + Protobuff, but I
> feel overwhelmed by the myriad of options out there (json, msgpack, thrift,
> bert, ubf, ...).
>
> I read some old threads in the list, but they are too old. I agree with an
> old Joe's comment about saving as much bandwidth you can, but I'm not sure
> how stable are programs like basho/protobuff and msgpack for erlang. It
> seems they don't evolve much in the last two years.
>
> Any though about this would be appreciated.
>
> Gustavo
>
> _______________________________________________
> erlang-questions mailing list
> erlang-questions@REDACTED
> http://erlang.org/mailman/listinfo/erlang-questions
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/attachments/20140826/bc6e91a4/attachment.htm>