today we released electroserver 4.06! from the release announcement:
You can now get through firewalls, opening your applications to the widest audience ever using the new HTTP connection option. If a client can’t successfully establish a socket connection with the server due to firewall security then HTTP connection can be used and it will just work. As a developer, the only difference in the way that you use the API is you will call createHttpConnection instead of createConnection. All other calls and events are identical!
the implementation wasn’t bad at all. due to the usage of mina on the backend, it was very simple to plug in alternate frontend that wraps our existing protocol. i hacked and back-ported pieces of the mina 2.x branch http client code for a very simple http implementation that wraps the electroserver binary protocol as the request/response payloads. it was really just an extra link in the chain before the existing logic that expected the binary protocol on the wire directly. add in some support for storing messages for clients and voila.
due to how mina itself works, comet / long poll support also “fell right out” of the implementation. this means that for message receipt, if there is an open channel, using http is just as performant as electroserver’s native binary protocol.
there was also another funny bug that i fixed that involved making a reentrantlock fair. this was the first time i had personally witnessed the needed to use this option, but when dealing with the need to process things in-order where messages can arrive via multiple threads, its a lifesaver.
Tags: code, electroank
November 3rd, 2008 at 6:27 am
Congratulations, Pete! It’s great to see you enjoy your new job.