CODEWITHSUNDEEP
protocol-buffersrpcthriftflatbufferscapnproto
Timmmm
Timmmm

Reputation: 96838

Are there any Thrift-style RPC systems that allow callbacks?

After using several different messaging and RPC systems I have come to the conclusion that you eventually always need traditional RPC, and push events of some kind. Otherwise you inevitably end up with some polling hack.

For example, HTTP originally only supported RPC-style methods (GET and POST return a response immediately). People realised that push events were needed so hacked it using long polling. Eventually this was fixed with Server-Sent Events.

CoAP (a lightweight UDP-based version of HTTP) also supports push events by adding a 'monitor' option to GET requests. It's a pretty elegant solution.

But neither of those are Thrift-style RPC, by which I mean you write an interface definition file, and there is some tool that compiles that interface into native code for your language of choice. Thereafter you can just call remote procedures almost as if they are local ones.

So my question is, are there any Thrift-style RPC systems that let you subscribe to push events and call a callback (or similar) when an event arrives?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 632

Answers (1)

Kenton Varda
Kenton Varda

Reputation: 45286

Yes:

  • gRPC supports "streaming", which means a single logical RPC call can actually involve multiple messages in each direction.
  • Cap'n Proto supports object capabilities, which allows either side of the connection to send an object reference to the other side, to which calls can be made. For example, the client could call a method on the server and, as one of the method parameters, provide a callback object. The callback object implements some pre-defined RPC interface. When the server calls the callback object, it is making a call back to the client. In fact, Cap'n Proto connections are fully symmetric: there is no distinction at the protocol level between client and server.

(Disclosure: I am the author of Cap'n Proto, and was also the author of Protocol Buffers v2, though I am not affiliated with gRPC.)

Upvotes: 4

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