<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Jul 13, 2011 at 7:16 AM, Matthew Hillsborough <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:matthew.hillsborough@gmail.com">matthew.hillsborough@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
Hi Joe,<div><br></div><div>Thanks for posting links to this. Surprised Joe A. did not mention it in his post, it has him listed as an author. :)</div><div><br></div><div>Just from a quick glimpse, this appears to be using MochiWeb, which is completely HTTP based. I am not entirely sure if that's the route I am looking to go, unless I am overlooking something here. With that said, there are probably parts of this code I can pick out and re-use in a pure TCP socket implementation (if this is indeed purely HTTP, which I suspect it might be).</div>
<div><br></div><div>Would love to hear I am wrong though so I do not need to reinvent the wheel.</div><div><br></div><div>Thank you and happy hacking -</div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Out of curiosity, is there a reason you wouldn't use thrift or protocol buffers? Even if you don't use their RPC mechanisms, you could use one of those as the serialized form for message passing (over plain sockets, if you so desire). I think a binary serialization format will still be more compact than JSON and faster to deserialize as well.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Cheers,</div><div>Joel</div><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;"><div><br></div><div>Matthew<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">
<div class="im">On Wed, Jul 13, 2011 at 9:43 AM, Joseph Norton <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:norton@alum.mit.edu" target="_blank">norton@alum.mit.edu</a>></span> wrote:<br>
</div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div style="word-wrap:break-word"><div class="im"><div><br></div><div>Matt -</div><div><br></div><div>There is already a client and server implementation similar to your idea that uses JSON as the wire format over TCP/IP. See the section "JSF" for a brief description:</div>
<div><br></div><div><a href="http://norton.github.com/ubf/ubf-user-guide.en.html#_tcp_ip" target="_blank">http://norton.github.com/ubf/ubf-user-guide.en.html#_tcp_ip</a></div><div><br></div></div><div>Download and building instructions are here:</div>
<div class="im">
<div><br></div><div><a href="https://github.com/norton/ubf-jsonrpc" target="_blank">https://github.com/norton/ubf-jsonrpc</a></div><div><br></div><div>Hope you find it helpful.</div><div><br></div><div>- Joe N.</div></div>
<div>
<div></div><div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><div class="im"><div>On Jul 13, 2011, at 9:42 PM, Matthew Hillsborough wrote:</div><br></div><div><div></div><div class="h5"><blockquote type="cite">Hi Ale and everyone else who replied,<div>
<br></div><div>That's exactly the point, I don't think HTTP is necessary at all! There is the overhead of sending extraneous HTTP headers over the wire. All of those additional bits take additional CPU time and bandwidth (on a mobile device with limited CPU and even more limited bandwidth!). I see absolutely no need for sending HTTP headers and parsing them from the response for this, particularly because I am not building a web browser based application. I have access to C/C++/Objective-C (on iOS) and Java (on Android) and these are perfectly capable of working with TCP sockets. A friend of mine suggested that I just pass messages to the server as JSON using a prefixed header that specifies the length of the message. That would be it! Simple and compact. </div>
<div><br></div><div>I just wanted to validate the idea and see if others thing I'll run into too many edge cases uses TCP sockets via an RPC type server to build this server/client architecture out. I want to really make it reusable so all of my mobile products can use it. </div>
<div><br></div><div>Loving all the advice coming in! Thanks all.</div><div><br></div><div>Matthew. <br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Jul 12, 2011 at 5:03 PM, Ale <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:peralta.alejandro@gmail.com" target="_blank">peralta.alejandro@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">Hi,<br>
<br>
Just a thought here... Erlang is great for scalability and handling<br>
multiple connections, and well I'm sure a lot of people can give you a<br>
better description fo this, but it occurred to me if you considered<br>
other protocols instead of HTTP? The problem seems to be there rather<br>
than the language you write your sever. It occurred to me that you<br>
might benefit from using Jabber/XMPP. Googling I found some iOS jabber<br>
clients <a href="http://code.google.com/p/xmppframework/" target="_blank">http://code.google.com/p/xmppframework/</a> and the cannonical<br>
jabber server is written in Erlang.<br>
<br>
Regards,<br>
<br>
2011/7/12 Matthew Hillsborough <<a href="mailto:matthew.hillsborough@gmail.com" target="_blank">matthew.hillsborough@gmail.com</a>>:<br>
<div><div></div><div>> Greetings Erlang community,<br>
> Let me further elaborate on my question that's in the subject of this<br>
> message. I tried to reach out with this question on StackOverflow, however I<br>
> did not have much luck there. Perhaps the community here can provide some<br>
> feedback here for me to let me know if I'm on the right track or if Erlang<br>
> is not the right tool for what I'm trying to accomplish.<br>
><br>
> I'm building native mobile applications in both iOS and Android. These apps<br>
> require "realtime" updates from and to the server, same as many (but not<br>
> all) network-based application does (Facebook, social games like Words with<br>
> Friends, Finance applications, etc). The communication here is<br>
> bi-directional, in the sense that the server might have updates for the<br>
> mobile clients and the clients will be pushing data down to the server<br>
> whenever necessary.<br>
><br>
> I think using HTTP long polling for this is over kill in the sense that long<br>
> polling can be detrimental to battery life, especially with a lot of TCP<br>
> setup/teardown for every HTTP connection the device needs to send out<br>
> through the wire. It might make sense to have the mobile applications use<br>
> persistent TCP sockets to establish a connection to the server, and send RPC<br>
> style commands to the server for all web service communication. This<br>
> ofcourse, would require a server to handle the long-lived TCP connection and<br>
> be able to speak to a web service once it makes sense of the data passed<br>
> down the TCP pipe. I'm thinking of passing data in plain text using JSON or<br>
> XML and then using some kind of Erlang interface to HTTP to call a web<br>
> service to handle all the REST type communication. The responses would then<br>
> go back to the "RPC" Erlang instance, which would send the updates to the<br>
> appropriate client(s).<br>
><br>
> Perhaps an Erlang based RPC server would do well for a network based<br>
> application like this. It would allow for the mobile apps to send and<br>
> receive data from the server all over one connection without multiple<br>
> setup/tear down that individual HTTP requests would do. Since no web browser<br>
> is involved, we do not need to deal with the nuances of HTTP long-polling at<br>
> the mobile client level. I also haven't seen great long polling/keep-alive<br>
> support on the client-side in iOS, but that's irrelevant for the community<br>
> here.<br>
><br>
> A lot of these "COMET" and long-polling/streaming servers are built with<br>
> HTTP in mind. I'm thinking just using a plain-text protocol over TCP is<br>
> better catered for the type of app I'm building, will make the client more<br>
> responsive, allow for receiving of updates from the server without<br>
> constantly polling the server, etc.<br>
><br>
> I also looked into HTTP pipelining, but it doesn't look to be worth the<br>
> trouble when it comes to implementing it on the clients. Also, I'm not sure<br>
> if it would allow for bi-directional communication in the client<->server<br>
> communication channel.<br>
><br>
> Am I completely out of line in thinking that building a custom solution in<br>
> Erlang is a good idea here? To my understanding, Erlang excels at servers<br>
> like this, and if I run the server on tcp/80, I should be able to avoid most<br>
> firewall/port issues. The client would need work to deal with timeouts, re<br>
> connections, acknowledging receipt of asynchronous requests, but that's not<br>
> Erlang's problem.<br>
><br>
> Has anyone built something similar before? Should I just stick to a web<br>
> server and deal with "COMET" type technologies? (WebSockets, long-polling,<br>
> client-side polling).<br>
><br>
> Was hoping someone could solidify that I'm not entirely insane for wanting a<br>
> better solution than HTTP would serve in this case, at least at the client<br>
> level. I'll still be using HTTP/REST extensively, the Erlang server would<br>
> just handle the persistent connections and messaging to the Web Service<br>
> (which would probably be something like Django or Rails).<br>
><br>
> Sorry for the long post; I am just excited to get into the heads of people<br>
> who are smarter than I.<br>
><br>
> Happy hacking!<br>
><br>
> Matthew<br>
><br>
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><br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
--<br>
<font color="#888888">Ale.<br>
</font></blockquote></div><br></div>
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<div>Joseph Norton</div><div><a href="mailto:norton@alum.mit.edu" target="_blank">norton@alum.mit.edu</a></div><div><br></div><br>
</div>
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