On Nov 10, 2008, at 2:28 PM, Rush Manbert wrote:
We have a Thrift server application that manages data on behalf of
numerous clients. We would like to add the capability for clients to
be notified when the managed data is changed. Clients would tell the
server what data they care about, and would be notified
asynchronously if the data changes.
You're talking about a classic pub/sub architecture here.
Clients talk to the server through an object interface that we have
layered on top of the Thrift client side interface. We were thinking
that we could add the notifications capability by adding a Thrift
server to the client side object. This server would listen for
notification messages on a runtime-selected port address. He would
register the port address with the managed data server when the
client side object is instantiated.
We like this approach because it means all of our client/server
interactions use a Thrift interface. It lets us easily have clients
be remote to the server.
You don't need to listen on random ports at client side, which can
cause all sorts of problems if there is any firewall in between. You
can have a subscription/topic manager at the server side to manage
connections from the clients.
My question is whether this seems like a good approach to the list
readers and the Thrift developers. Is there some mechanism already
in place within the Thrift library for this? Is there some other
better approach?
I don't think there is an equivalent of subscription/topic manager in
Thrift. The problem has been solved comprehensively before and
elsewhere though. See IceStorm for some ideas:
http://zeroc.com/doc/Ice-3.3.0-IceTouch/manual/IceStorm.html
__Luke
