On 12 Jul '08, at 6:40 PM, em wrote:
I can easily transport 'strings' over a network using UDP multi- casting/broadcasting via Quartz Composer, but some of these strings may get a little lengthy. What's a good language statement(s) (obj c API) for transporting small (10MB) data structures over a network?
UDP's not well suited to that. The maximum size of a packet is 64kbytes, and in practice, packets larger than a few kbytes often get lost due to fragmentation. Best practice with UDP is to keep the packet size under about 1400 bytes so it fits in a single Ethernet packet, and to be ready to handle packets that are dropped, or arrive multiple times or in the wrong order.
So you're better off using TCP. Leave a connection open between the machines and send messages over it (in either direction) when you have data. But you need a framing protocol to define the boundaries of messages, match messages with responses, let you interleave messages, and so on. Nowadays most people do this with HTTP, but that's an asymmetric protocol and CF/Cocoa don't come with a server-side implementation, only a client. Other options are to invent yet another protocol to do this (which can become a mess) or use a generic message protocol like BEEP.
In my case I went with BEEP, but there is no available Obj-C API for it [though Xgrid has its own private implementation], and the open- source C library I first used became more trouble than it was worth, so I ended up designing and implementing a simple BEEP-like protocol called BLIP <http://projects.mooseyard.com/wiki/1/BLIP>. It has a simple Objective-C API that lets you send messages from one machine to another, and optionally send replies. It should work well for what you're trying to do.
—Jens
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