Re: schema handshake using HTTP headers

[Scott Carey <sc...@apache.org>]

One of the reasons why HTTP was chosen for the reference RPC was because it
can be made proxy friendly.

Please open a JIRA on this issue to discuss.  If you have an approach that
is already in progress, submit a patch!  Apache is a 'do-ocrocy'.

I suspect there will be some discussion about backwards compatibility and
the spec, but the experts on Avro RPC will have more to contribute to that
discussion. 

Thanks,

-Scott
On 8/24/11 9:39 AM, "Shafi, Saleem" <sa...@x.com> wrote:

> Hello all,
>  
> We¹re experimenting a bit with Avro and we¹ve got a use case that I¹m hoping
> to get some help with..  we¹d like clients to be able to send messages to a
> server that would then forward the messages to a third-party (still in Avro),
> but the messaging would be asynchronous..  the trouble we¹re running into is
> with the schema handshake since there¹s someone between the client and the
> ultimate recipient of the message..  we¹d like to avoid having the middle-man
> open up the body of the HTTP request but we can¹t negotiate the handshake
> without it..
>  
> Since the transport is abstracted out, would it make any sense at all to push
> the handshake request into HTTP headers for the HTTP transport?  Other
> transports could still embed the handshake message with the rest of the
> message, but by pushing the handshake into the headers for HTTP, a proxy like
> ours could negotiate the handshake without opening up the body..  this could
> arguably improve performance even in normal request/response scenarios since
> the body wouldn¹t have to be parsed twice in cases where the client has to
> resend the request with a new schema..
>  
> If this seems like a reasonable approach, we might be able to put together an
> prototype implementation with one of the bindings and see if it makes sense to
> adjust the spec..
>  
> Thanks,
> Saleem.