Thursday, April 26, 2012

Episode 14: IDLs


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News
Tool of the Biweek

Interface Description Langauges (IDLs)

History
  • Beginning
    • CORBA
    • DCOM
    • ICE
  • Early Web Era
    • SOAP (XML-RPC)
    • JSON-RPC
  • Modern IDLs
    • Protocol Buffers
    • Apache Thrift


Features
  • Messages
    • Container classes with convenience functions
  • Protocols
    • Binary, JSON, Compact
  • Transports
    • Memory, File, Http request, socket

Strengths
  • Automatic code generation
  • Interoperability among languages

Weaknesses
  • Engineering Overhead
  • Bandwidth overhead

Tools

Uses
  • RPC
  • Serialization
  • Storage (some NoSQL databases)