[Miwi-middleware] KIARA/DFKI Java Design Document Revised

[Philipp Slusallek]

Hi,

Thanks Dmitri! We had a discussion after our call on Friday and refined
out ideas about the "IDL-derived" API (see email for an explanation for
using that term). Dmitri has worked out all the details and came up with
a great approach: After a quick iteration, we now provide our view on
the upcoming Java-API to all.

Please have a look and provide feedback and comments!

I believe that we have found a nice way of integrating the IDL-derived
API such that it is almost identical to traditional middleware API where
the API is derived from the IDL (which we called "static" before).

Specifically, we compare our proposed API directly to Thrift and point
out why it is equally simple (actually simpler), but more powerful and
more scalable.

I am really like the approach about how well it compares to traditional
designs but allows for going well beyond those. We had discussed this
"static" API before with Jaime in our meetings and thought that it would
work out well, but this is the first time we worked through all (most?)
of the details.

There is certainly room for improvements or alternative implementations,
though. We would like to hear your input as well as look at and compare
this with your proposals as planned


Extensions:

Scalability: By adding some new calls we can extend/scale the API to
also support the application-derived API that we contributed to the core
of KIARA in the original proposal. As you can see its fits nicely with
the IDL-derived API, which is a good thing.

Security: We have not included our thoughts on security yet (as
discussed) but they can be nicely integrated and then offer
significantly better and fully automatic security features. We are happy
to present those ideas later, when appropriate.

Asynchronous and threads: There are a number of other extensions that we
have in mind regarding threading, asynchronous calls, and object
references that we have excluded. they should be easily added to what we
have now. Again we are happy to discuss those, when you want.

Finally a last aspect: This API design can be transferred to C/C++ with
some small changes. the same simplicity of the base API and scalability
applies there. It then avoid some of the (internal) complexity at the
cost of a more static behavior. But we then offer both.


Best,

	Philipp


P.S.: Off the record (as we are only discussing API design for now): The
proposed API can be implemented pretty quickly given our current Java
version. In case someone wants to already evaluate that option and see
if they agree or not agree on our implementation choices, feel free to
look at and comment the code from Dmitri. Since it is Java and we are
not (yet) doing the runtime compilation it should be nicely readable and
understandable. We are very much open to suggestion to improve that code
base where necessary. It is certainly not as well optimzed as the C/C++
code yet.

Jaime: I would still be highly interested in the joint uKIARA
implementation and us jointly developing this. As we discussed in
Madrid, as a research institute we cannot maintain and support our KIARA
the code forever. And particularly for industry customers having a
commercial support option is really interesting, if not mandatory. It
would be nice if we may be able find better agreement along those lines.

With the "static" API we might now have a good basis for that, where you
can offer a good basis version that you are familiar with and we can add
all the fancy thing on top of that (including security) that is critical
to us and that you might eventually also be interested and confident in.
Note that our Java code is already interoperable with the C/C++ version
of KIARA as as well as the C# and JS versions.



Am 28.09.2014 um 12:44 schrieb Dmitri Rubinstein:
> In the attachment is a revised KIARA/DFKI Java Design Document. Comments
> are as usually welcome.
> 
> Best,
> 
> Dmitri
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Miwi-middleware mailing list
> Miwi-middleware at lists.fi-ware.org
> https://lists.fi-ware.org/listinfo/miwi-middleware
> 


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