Should I use CORBA, MessagePack RPC or Thrift, or something else entirely?

Question

I'm writing software for a new hardware device which I want any kind of new third-party application to be able to access if they want to.

The software will be a native process (C++) that should be pollable by 3rd party games and applications that want to support the hardware device. Those 3rd party apps should also be able to receive events from the native process, on a subscribe basis. So aside from the native process, I'll also supply "connector" libraries to the 3rd party developers, for all platforms/languages that they might choose (Java, C++, Python etc.) to embed in their apps so they can easily connect to the device with hardly any extra code needing to be written by them. I want to target all desktop/laptop OS platforms, and have a pretty good idea of what functions I want to expose, but ideally I don't want to be too stuck (i.e. I want it to be elegantly scalable from both client and server perspectives).

I'm looking for reliability going forward, performance, maintainability going forward, and cross-platform/language flexibility going forward, and ease of development, in that order.

What should I use?

CORBA, MessagePack-RPC, Thrift, or something else entirely?

(I've omitted ICE because of it's licensing)

Answer 1

CORBA is the only free "RPC" thing that would work for my system right now, even though it scales very badly. Thrift isn't Windows-friendly yet. Neither is MessagePack-RPC yet available in all languages and OSs, even though it's still in development. If CORBA was elegantly scalable it probably wouldn't have become obsolete at all.

Protocol Buffers and messaging would work, I'd have to develop a both a client and service implementation for every platform/language. It would also be very scalable. I've decided on this.

Answer 2

Thrift or Message Pack is the best option going forward. Both are sleek, light weight and do not add much latencies to your process. They have support for most of the common languages, and are in Active Development. At the current stage I would prefer thrift personally but message pack does seem to promise a lot of features.

Thought thrift might not be as windows friendly as we want but people are using it on windows. This is a starter guide for thrift on windows. http://wiki.apache.org/thrift/ThriftInstallationWin32 Only installing and getting the Thrift compiler can be troublesome on windows. Using the generated files depend on the language you choose and lot of the languages have good support to run the files by importing thrift libraries. (Java it is very easy, MAVEN artifact)

There is a discussion on the RPC frameworks available at RPC frameworks available?

CORBA according to me is old cumbersome and very heavyweight.

Answer 3

If ancient and heavyweight don't put you off, obsolete definitely should. Regardless, I can tell you what we've been using Google Protocol Buffers at work recently, and they're pretty easy to use.

From the developer's perspective, all you need to do is have a build of GPB (which really isn't that difficult), and then it will generate source files for you. The end result is a cross-platform binary message transport message passing interface (think XML and limited RMI, not MPI-like functionality).

We use it on Windows to talk to an Arm-based Linux system (TS-7200's from embedded arm) running the same software. to my knowledge, it is compatible with many languages.

Answer 4

I'm currently using Apache Thrift for a Hospital Manager project. It is better than CORBA in many areas, not to mention it is lightweight and much easier to implement and understand. The learning curve for Thrift is definitely subtle compared to CORBA, but the documentation for Thrift is the worst thing.

I'm using a Ruby Thrift server to which Obj-C and Java clients connect. The Thrift parser or "compiler" does a pretty good job generating source files for the languages you want, although it is far too verbose. I would definitely look into implementing Thrift, or Google ProtoBuffs if I was starting a new project, since CORBA is really outdated, and might not implement new technologies in the future, not to mention that there are many vulnerabilities and exploits targeting CORBA that will not get patched since it's not in development anymore, presenting some serious security holes on your new project.

Thrift supports many programming languages: C++, Java, Python, PHP, Ruby, Erlang, Perl, Haskell, C#, Objective-C, JavaScript, Node.js, Smalltalk, OCaml and Delphi as of this writing. Supporting multiple languages is key, I think, for the purpose of your project.