Design Decision – communication protocol

Requirements:

• Easy to extend and human readable

• Message producer do not need to know anything about message consumers

• “scale able” and therefore it works for a view as good for many participants, which means the number of participants can change constantly during runtime

Possible approaches :

A) Binary protocol

• More size efficient then text based

• Difficult to use i.e. on command line for shell scripting without dedicated utilities

• Not human readable

• BSON could be a possible solution

  • Extendable

  • More efficient then text based, due to no text parsing overhead

B) text based protocol

• Easy to use i.e. on command line

• Human readable

• Somewhat laborious to use in low level languages like C

• json

  • Readable but compact in size

  • Well known / supported

  • Structured and type support

  • Not as cycle efficient as binary protocols due to parsing overhead

Decision:

Use a JSON based protocol as:

• Is easy to extend , important for future feature requests

• Easy to use on command line, many tools/libraries available and proven in use

• Basic type support: possible to encode integer, floating points strings, objects/maps and arrays