[Twisted-Python] How to dispatch message to different servers

[Phil Mayers]

On 03/02/2013 12:19 PM, Glyph wrote:

> I wrote a blog post some time ago explaining why you want static
> declarations, even if your programming language is all nice and dynamic:

Being able to "early drop" bad PDUs is a fine notion, but it's not a 
property that comes with zero cost. If you feel that the cost/benefit 
tradeoff is not useful in your case (and I do) then it doesn't make 
sense to pay it.

AMP would be somewhat more attractive (to me) if it were possible to run 
with the IDL just on the "server" (i.e. callee); this would achieve the 
goal of protocol-level sanity checking, without the cost of having to 
distribute the IDL to the clients. Presumably it would be possible to 
implement this now - have an AMP discovery command that dynamically 
builds the client-side IDLs. But there's no incentive for me to do that.

For the use-cases I have, the protocol version/interop problem is not 
relevant.

> not full replacements for AMP because they're asymmetrical and don't
> support pipelining.  With AMP, a client can receive requests from a
> server, you don't need to have a TCP handshake for every request, you

You don't need to do a TCP handshake for every request in any of those 
protocols either. Long-lived TCP/HTTP sessions are quite common, though 
not universal.

It will be interesting to see if and how HTTP/2.0 solves a lot of these 
issues.

> can receive responses out of order, and you can receive a request while
> waiting for a response, and so on.

Obviously. But I would tend to use those protocols when either those 
properties are not needed (perhaps even undesireable) and may be 
impossible to make use of (if the far end is a synchronous, blocking 
client unable to make use of out-of-order responses or server-initiated 
messages).

In those cases, it would also be rare for AMP to be available, and it 
certainly wouldn't be pre-installed.

"Install this Java library on your Oracle servers then..."
"Ha ha no go away."

You seemed curious why someone wouldn't use AMP. Personally I have two 
common use-cases:

  1. Communicating between two trusted Twisted processes, for which PB 
is good enough.

  2. Communicating with a semi-trusted third party process, for which a 
RESTful interface or XML/JSON RPCs are *available* and sufficiently 
secure and capable for my needs.

Obviously other people will have radically different needs, but for me, 
AMP adds little.

Cheers,
Phil