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Could you, please, suggest - if I need maximum intersystem/language compatibility, while the main server will be implemented on .NET, could I use NServiceBus or MassTransit, or is it better to use pure RabbitMQ instead?
NServiceBus or MassTransit would give pretty nice abstracrion level, but the easiness of communication between different solutions and environments are critical. I'm thinking more of using pure RabbitMQ now, but would be really gratefull for pointing put some pros and cons if I'm taking it into account wrong.
If you have multiple applications with different languages internally that must send and receive messages I would not recommend NServiceBus or MassTransit. They require certain message headers that they themselves add. You would never be able to leverage all the functionality offered by these messaging frameworks. However, if internally you are all .NET and you have multiple applications that will use the messaging infrastructure then NServiceBus and MassTransit will add a lot of value.
Regarding interoperability with third parties. A strength and weakness of both NServiceBus and MassTransit is that you must send and receive messages as strongly typed classes or interfaces. These get serialised to JSON/XML/BSON etc and deserialised back to types again.
Because of this they require message headers that indicate the type of the message for deserialisation purposes. Without the message type headers they won't work.
Working with types is much easier but it can cause interoperability issues. When integrating with third parties that send XML or JSON messages with no types requires you to create a translation tier between your services and the third party.
You could translate to your own type that maps onto the XML/JSON or translate to a simple type that contains a string property for the XML/JSON. Either way, your translation tier would publish the messages internally using MassTransit/NServiceBus and so the messages would contain all the necessary headers to fully exploit all the functionality they offer.
For sending messages to the third party, the translation tier would translate the messages to the XML/JSON expected by the third party.
How much of your messaging system is involved with 3rd party/inter-system integrations? If the answer is very little then NServiceBus and MassTransit would be great options as they offer lots of great functionality.
If the answer is a lot, then they might still be good options. Having a translation tier will shield your internal services from being exposed to the requirements and changing schemas of your third parties. It will give you greater control and flexibility at a cost of extra moving parts.
Ultimately, the translation tier is not as complex as implementing the patterns offered out-of-the-box by NServiceBus and MassTransit. So I would seriously consider them as a viable option.
Some links regarding inter-operability
https://docs.particular.net/nservicebus/messaging/third-party-integration
http://masstransit-project.com/MassTransit/advanced/interoperability.html
What would be the pros and cons of these architectures?
By RPC I meant remote procedure call services like WCF, WebServices
etc.
Then on the other side, there's the more message oriented frameworks
such as MSMQ, NServiceBus, ServiceStack etc.
Then there is the hybrid approach such as WebAPI, which is some sort
of a remote Active Record Pattern (Out of the box it only supports a very
limited number of verbs such as "Get", "Put" "Post" etc.).
Disregarding, how it's actually implemented (aka. I don't really care about durability, transaction etc. because all that can be implemented regardless of the abstraction), what would be the benefits and drawbacks of these abstractions?
Again, no low level implementation details please, I just want the difference in terms of sound architecture, best patterns and practices, or even circumstances that would be most appropriate to employ each and why.
The only benefit of RPC is that it looks familiar and gives developers the illusion that a service call looks and acts just like a normal method call.
Otherwise RPC method signatures are tightly-coupled, fragile and brittle and ties the contract of your service to its single server implementation. Here's an earlier answer comparing the same WCF and Web API RPC services re-written in a message-based service.
For background reading I've described the differences between RPC vs Message based services in the WCF vs ServiceStack interview on InfoQ as well as what a message-based service is and their many advantages.
I want to learn more about sending and receiving packets with Obj C. I want to learn more about packet IDs and types. Any ideas on some easy tutorials apart from the Apple Documentation?
Thanks guys!
Note: I do have basic knowlage of how to send packets. But I need to learn more about types and IDs. At the moment Im failing to make a login with login.minecraft.net.
Holy layer violation, batman!
I think what you really want to learn about is HTTP communication under iOS, not TCP/IP packets. In this day and age, there is no reason to dip down to TCP/UDP unless you are inventing a new protocol. For every protocol that exists with any popularity, there is a library that encapsulates it.
In this case, it looks like Minecraft is built on HTTP. Which is no surprise; unless your game needs realtime interaction, HTTP is a ubiquitous protocol that routes through anything.
Thus, I'd suggest you start with one of the HTTP programming guides.
I'm just about getting into WCF; but from what I've read so far, like the sample scenarios I found on MSDN and some other sites, I can do all that with web services and applications that call those web services. So why the need for an elaborate layer like WCF?
Most of the comparisons I've googled for explain it more from a programming point of view. Still trying to find answers without much success as to when it makes business and of course programming sense to use the WCF layer as opposed to traditional application to web services model.
Anyone here with experience on both and can advice on how to go about choosing either web services or going the WCF way? What are those things that can't absolutely be done using just plain old web services called by applications and where the WCF layer will save the day.
You've fallen for the Microsoft trap of "it's just about web services" :-)
It's actually a lot more:
it's about service-oriented programming in general (not just web services - you can also write TCP/IP based services, MSMQ queue-based messaging and a lot more)
it's about unifying all the diverse programming models that existed so far (ASMX, Enterprise Services, DCOM, .NET remoting)
it's about providing a lot of ready-made and ready-to-use plumbing which can handle things like reliable messaging, transaction support, security in any shape or form you'd like, service discovery, and a lot more
it's about separating the service implementation from the details of how clients will call it and making this a configurable stack of protocols, encodings etc.
Sure - most of this stuff can be done in ASMX, or .NET remoting - but try to convert an ASMX web service to be callable in your intranet using TCP/IP and transport security... Many of those "older" technologies have a very intricate and direct link to how they're being used - you can't easily change that without changing the whole service code.
WCF separates all these "plumbing details" like what endpoint to call, what protocol to use to call it, how to handle security etc. out into a "WCF stack" that's configurable and composable, so you can easily switch your service XYZ to use HTTP allowing anonymous users to call it, to using TCP/IP with Windows credentials required - your service code won't change a bit - it's only configuration of the plumbing.
That to me is the most compelling reason for WCF - I can totally concentrate on my actual service code, and not pollute it with lots of plumbing stuff - how to handle transports and text encodings and all that. And I can easily change that and adapt to new requirements and needs in deployment without having to touch my actual service code.
Plus, the second major point is extensibility - most of the older technologies just had their one, set way of doing things and many didn't lend themselves to being extended. You had to either adapt to use it the way they did it - or forget about it. WCF has a vast and very intricate system for extending just about anything - you can create your own transport protocol (people have created UDP or SMTP based bindings), you can create your own message encoders (like I had to do to talk to a web service which could only understand ISO-8859-1 encoded messages), and you can extend just about anything else in WCF - all in an organized, well-documented, very stable and safe way.
So these two things - separating out plumbing into configurable layers, and extensibility to the maximum - are the most compelling reasons for me to use WCF.
Edit: Kobi's link above, is a far better answer than mine.
WCF is basically a better architecture for supporting communications. It breaks many dependencies such as hosting (not iis dependent), transport, security, addressing into plugin components, and allows customisation to a very high degree.
Yes you can do a lot with traditional technologies, however you can do more with WCF. If you don't need the features now then of course you can can continue with legacy technologies, however if you prefer you can opt for a better architecture now with an eye on the future but it comes at a cost of having to switch technologies now.
Take this example. If you have a legacy asmx web service, how easily can you offer the same service via an MSMQed endpoint? With WCF its as simple as adding new config settings.
I assume that you are not asking "why not just stick with SOAP/HTTP". WSF allows you to choose a number of different transports rather than just simple HTTP, but as you observe the WS-* technologies allow you to do all that. So I think you're asking why use a powerful but complex framework when the raw technolgies are not impossibly complex?
You could ask this same question of any Framework. You could just use the basic technologies and avoid the learning curve of adopting the framework.
Frameworks such as WCF do have a learning curve, but consider what happens if you don't use them:
You find that you write boiler-plate code for each service invocation. You then either accept duplication or begin to refactor and build your own libraries. Before long you've developed your own Framework, but it's not the same as anybody else's. So then any new team memeber has to learn your local framework, serious learning currve.
Note also that WCF addresses issues such as the monitoring of the deployed solution.
The biggest appeal to me is testability. Services are defined by a CLR interface, which is quite easy to mock inside a test harness. Some words of warning, however. With great flexibility comes some pain in the configuration process, along with a few "gotchas". An example of a gotcha is that WCF--adhering closely to a "best practice"--requires an active SSL connection in order to pass SOAP authentication credentials over HTTP. This hinders testing quite a bit.
ZeroC's ICE (www.zeroc.com) looks interesting and I am interested in looking at it and comparing it to our existing software that uses WCF. In particular, our WCF app uses server callbacks (via HTTP).
Anybody who's compared them? How did it go? I'm particularly interested in the performance aspect, since interoperability isn't much of a concern for us right now. Thanks!
I did a very terse review of ICE a few years ago, and although I haven't compared them directly before, having reasonable knowledge of WCF my thoughts might have some relevance.
Firstly, it's not entierely fair to compare WCF with ICE as WCF as ICE is a specific remote communication mechanism and WCF is a higher level remote communications framework.
While WCF is often thought of as implementing SOAP web services, and that is indeed its main use to date, it can also be used for implementing remote services using all manner of encodings and transport channels, which means it can theoretically be used for performant comms between applications.
In comparison, ICE is a cross-platform remote communicaton mechanism that uses binary encoding for performant communications between applications. It's something of a simplified evolution of CORBA and is more directly comparable to CORBA, DCOM, .NET Remoting, and JNI.
However, even though there's no direct correspondence between ICE and WCF, if you need your .NET app to communicate remotely then they're both contenders. Some of the decision points you might want to consider include:
Resourcing. It'll be easier to find developers with WCF experience than ICE experience.
Performance. If you want performance then ICE performs fast, but WCF can also be used in a performant configuration. Alternatively, .NET Remoting can provide very good performance, and whatever the MS-sponsored benchmarks say I've seen it outperform WCF by 10%.
Cross-platform. If you need to communicate with non-Windows applications then you're limited with the WCF options you can use. In addition, since every SOAP stack seems to implement the standards differently it can be a pain creating truly generic Web Services (though WS-I helps)
If you don't need every ounce of performance from day one, then I'd personally plump for WCF to start with, and then consider ICE if performance ever becomes critical. Even then it might be cheaper to scale out your service boxes than it is to move to ICE, and if you don't have any exotic cross-platform needs then you could always look at reconfiguring WCF for binary encoding etc
Michi Henning from ZeroC has recently published a white paper on just this topic -- "Choosing Middleware: Why Performance and Scalability do (and do not) Matter". It compares Ice, WCF (binary & SOAP), and RMI with various performance metrics, platforms, languages, etc. There's more information on Michi's blog, but the white paper is also quite readable, with all the standard caveats of any benchmark.
Disclaimer: I've used Ice and RMI extensively, but never WCF.
Apache Thrift is another contender to ICE and WCF. It was developed and open sourced by Facebook. Apache Thrift is nice in some ways because its not only extremely efficient on the encoding side, it also supports adding of fields to structures without breaking all of the clients (something we found extremely useful for our projects).
Google Protocol Buffers would seem not really a contender as it doesn't mention .NET support on the home page. However, some community addons support C#. In addition, ICE provides emulation for Google Protocol Buffers if you're working with existing services.
Data point: we just converted a callback multi-platform and multi-language project from Ice to Thrift with pretty good results. Ice does a lot for you, so we had to implement disconnection listeners, connection events, etc. ourselves. And in one case we got bit in the proverbial with a big object lock that Ice was letting us get away with -- this caused a deadlock in the Thrift server but it was easily fixed by less lazy coding on the C# side.
I've just finished benchmarking, and in our application anything that pushes large amounts of data is faster than, or on par with, Ice. Shorter messages with more over-head (i.e., a "heartbeat" that updates a status over the protocol) is a bit slower.
The most important bit was that in order to implement the callback service correctly we had to extend Thrift interfaces and define our own protocol, along with a Thrift "Processor" and callback client-server. But I freely admit our application is /very/ special. The existing protocols and servers should be sufficient. But extending them, even to use multiplex sockets from .Net, was not terribly difficult.
We are using ICE to integrate modules written in both C++, Java and C#. The nice thing is that our server can access components on remote machines as well, so if we need more performance we can shift processing to different machines.
I've used both WCF and ICE, and I'd say that ICE is cleaner on the implementation side. ICE also has very detailed and readable documentation.
ICE supports some things that WCF cannot do, including load balancing, automated remote client updates, etc.