Hi, from my point of view the pillars of future services are Google protobuf[1] and gRPC. Protobuf can be used for configuration files[2], tracing/logging[3] and storage[4]. gRPC is built on top-of HTTP2 and is using the protobuf IDL and marshaling. Many projects (etcd, envoy, Google Cloud, ...) provide a gRPC based API (and some automatically map this from REST to gRPC) already and I would like to build clients and servers in Pharo.
My plan of action is to start with a protobuf compiler/model and then look into binding the gRPC C implementation to Pharo. I have started with gokr's Protobuf code on Smalltalkhub and defined base types and a Slot and could use some help to structure this more nicely. The code is at: https://github.com/zecke/pharo-protobuf and I could use some comments/review of how to use Slots in a significant way (add "type" validation on write, constraint checks, builder pattern?). Given a definition like: syntax = "proto2"; package foo; enum Color { RED = 0; GREEN = 1; BLUE = 2; } message MyMessage { optional Color color = 1; } And an encoded binary message of #[8 2] the following can: PBTestMessage materializeFrom: #[8 2] readStream decode and set the color field. Proper handling of mandatory and repeated fields are missing and decoding the other values, nested messages... :) Looking forward to have some eyes on the code. holger [1] A simple IDL to define structs/enums with marshaller/materializer for a binary protocol, JSON (and yaml). [2] Without having to write a XML/JSON schema and getting validation from the IDL. [3] Many of us log structured to text, then have something like logstash to re-parse, regexp it and dump it into ElasticSearch. With protobuf we can have plain objects end to end for logging. [4] We have FUEL so this is less interesting for us than others but quite interesting if you are mixing Pharo with other implementation languages.
