Hi Kevin, This will be a great addition. We, at LinkedIn are also seeing the need to have Helix Participant in other languages such as Python. Python already has some good zk libraries. I am not sure if we have good zk libraries in node.js/javascript (Patrick, might have some suggestions).
I think it will definitely help the community and we are interested in python implementation. The best way to approach this would be to first come up with a minimal spec required for the participant. Currently things that participant does is - Create a ephemeral node under liveinstances when it starts - Listen to messages node for commands from the controller - Update the current state with the result of the command. thanks, Kishore G On Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 11:24 AM, Kevin Gao <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi all, > > My colleagues at Box and I are considering developing a Node.js based > Helix participant library as an open source project. I first and foremost > wanted to gauge how useful this would be in the community's use cases. For > us, the main service runs on Node.js and is the actual owner of resources, > while we treat Helix as the one, shared source of truth regarding which > nodes own what resources. This introduces a split brain scenario between > the two. In the mean time, we have introduced health checking and state > validation to ensure that the two are consistent. Additionally, we have > developed a local protocol for communicating state transitions. However, > maintaining this architecture leaves room for inconsistency as well as > significant slow down in developing actual application logic. > > What we think would be extremely useful to us is to have write a > JavaScript-based participant library. This involves a few major questions > to be answered first: > > * Is the community interested in the availability of this project? > * Is there a reliable, vetted ZooKeeper client for Node.js? > * What components of the Helix library need to be ported over? > * Related to the previous question, what feature set is required at > minimum for a production-ready library? > * How difficult would it be to maintain this library in parallel to the > main Helix distribution? > > My team and I would appreciate any feedback or input you have! > > Best, > Kevin > > -- > Kevin Gao > [email protected] >
