In the last month I rewrote the IDR prototype from scratch and translated the IDR specification document in English. During this process I made a few enhancements in the IDR encoding. I removed an ambiguity with exceptions decoding in some very unlikely situations. The other change was to integrate the update of IEEE 754 specification in 2008 that now defines four types of floating point values, 2 Bytes, 4 Bytes, 8 Bytes and 16 Bytes. It may take some time until these types reach your desk, but IDR should better stick to the standards. So these will be the floating point encodings supported by IDR.
Beside these, there was a much bigger problem left in the API of object deserialization. The problem is to determine what to do when the decoder doesn't recognize the class type of a serialized object. The solution I came up is very satisfying since it matches all the requirements I had. It remains to check its usage convenience with real examples.
The problem
Object deserialization is a process in which the decoder reconstruct the serialized object aggregate. To do so it has to reconstruct each object of the aggregate and restore their pointers to each other. Objects are reconstructed by using object factories, a classic in design pattern. An object factory is an object that "knows" how to reconstruct some types of objects.
The decoder has thus a collection of factories to which it delegates the reconstruction of the different types of objects found in the serialized aggregate. But what happens if the decoder can't find an appropriate factory for some type of serialized object ? In some use case this should be considered as an error, but in others it might be an acceptable and even desirable situation.
Consider for instance exceptions. In IDR an exception is an object and handled as such. There is no point, and even impossible, for a decoder to have a factory for all possible exceptions in the world. It is enough for the decoder to have a factory for the common exception base classes and, of course, the one it has to deal with. It should then be enough to reconstruct the object as an instance of the parent class it has a factory for, a process called object slicing.
The worst case is when the decoder may not even slice the object because none of the parent class is "known" by the decoder. In this case the best the decoder can do is to ignore the object and set all references to it to NULL. We'll call this process object pruning. As for slicing, it may be considered as an acceptable and even desirable behavior with some use cases (i.e optional properties), and an error in others since the lobotomized data structured may end up too crippled or even invalid.
The problem is thus to define the appropriate behaviour of the decoder when a slicing or pruning occurs. In some case it is an error, in others not, and in some case it depends on what part of the aggregate the slicing or pruning took place.
The solution
The decision whether it is an error or not is obviously context specific and have thus to be put in the hands of the user. So the problem boiled down to determine how the user would able to select the appropriate behavior.
The solution I came up was to provide three object deserialization methods.
1. A strict object decoder that would throw an exception and abort object decoding as soon as a missing object factory is detected. With this you get an exact reconstruction or a failure.
2. A lax object decoder that would slice and prune at will and return whatever comes out of it, and nothing else. This object decoder would for instance be used for exceptions.
3. Another lax object decoder, like the previous one, but that would also return a feedback on the missing object factories. The feedback on slicing would be an associative index mapping sliced object references to the list of their unrecognized classs types. The feedback on pruning would be a list of the different types of pruned object with a list of the unrecognized class type and the number of instance pruned.
The later method would make it possible and easy for the user to determine if slicing and pruning occurred, what are the missing factories and test for specific objects if slicing took place and to what extend. Since this method would give an easy way to test if slicing or pruning took place, the strict object decoder may seem unnecessary. The reason of its presence is that it may stop the decoding process as soon as a missing factory is detected and thus avoid wasting resources when an exact reconstruction is required and no feedback is needed.
I'm very satisfied by this solution because it keeps the API simple with only a small effort on the decoder implementation. What I still need to validate is how convenient it is to use.
I just found a relevant question on StackOverflow asking for a good general purpose binary protocol. If you are interested in distributed information systems and their protocols, this topic might be a good read.
The following figure shows the kernel components of the Distributed Information System, the road map and how far I am today. The items in black are implemented and operational and the items in gray still needs to be implemented. Progress is going clockwise :).
OID An OID is to DIS what the URL is to the web. It is a unique, binary encoded and non reusable reference to an information published in the distributed information system. It was the first tile I designed and implemented. Its simplicity is inversely proportional to the time and effort required to invent it because I had to explore and compare many different possible and existing solutions.
IDR It is to DIS what HTML or XML is to the web. IDR is the Information Data Representation used in DIS. It is a stream oriented encoding with support of object serialization and exceptions. The prototype implementation is currently being fully rewritten. It still miss the ability to specify the encoding version or a formalization of data description. The later is required to be able to display data in a human readable format or to automatically generate data manipulation functions or containers mapped to different programming languages.
DITP It is to DIS what HTTP is to the web. It is the protocol used to exchange information or invoke remote actions in DIS. It is very simple, modular and extensible through the use of dynamically configurable data processing tasks. Support of compression, authentication or encryption is then provided by some kinds of plugins. The protocol use the object oriented model with remote method invocation. The current prototype does not yet support concurrent asynchronous method invocation.
DIS DIS stands here for Distributed Information Service and is not to be confused with Distributed Information System. It is fundamental to DIS, so a confusion is not really a problem. This service combines the properties of DNS and LDAP and would be a new kind of service on the Internet. I can't disclose more on it because it is still in development. A first prototype has been implemented unfortunately proving the need to support data description.
SEC This part covers authentication and access control in DIS. It requires a functional DIS service. An interesting feature is that it is designed to scale up so that a service could cope with millions of different users without having to keep track of million accounts and passwords.
IDX It is a service simply mapping human readable UTF8 strings to OID references. It is equivalent to the list of named entries in a directory. Like any other services, its access is controlled by ACL and can thus be modified remotely with appropriate privileges. An index may be huge with multiple alternate entry point, exactly like the DNS but exclusively as a flat name space. The OID associated to the UTF8 string is stored in an object so that polymorphism allow to associate images (icons) and other informations to entries by extension.
DIR It is a graph of IDX services with one root entry. Services or information published in DIS can then be referenced by a humanly readable path in the IDX graph relative to the root.
It is an ambitious project but, I am convinced, its added value is worth the effort. I wish I could work full time on this project with the help of some other developers, but this would require funding I don't have access to for now.
An application would help demonstrating the added value of the system. I'm still looking for one with an optimal balance in development effort and success potential.
While developing a prototype of DIS to check and validate it, I'm frequently confronted to bugs.
One reason is that the complexity of the program is comparable to a compiler. Individual encoding rules are simple, but they can be used in an infinite set of combinations.
After testing many different debuggers on Linux, my conclusion is that none of them is as good as the one of Visual C++ on Windows. So when I have to develop new code which may require debugging, I always develop it with Visual C++. Once it is validated, I move it on Linux.
The biggest difference is in the capability to explore data structures, STL containers, and other application specific data. If there wasn't Visual C++, I would have completely dropped Windows. It was thus a very smart marketing move of Microsoft to make Visual C++ available for free.
But Visual C++ is not yet perfect. So when not debugging, I prefer working on Linux. On feature I'm really missing in Visual C++ is one provided in Eclipse.
With object oriented programming, one usually store one class per file. I guess it is to simplify locating the class definition information. Simply look for a file with the same name as the class. The back side of this is that we end up with the code spread in many files. But when browsing the code, I often met a method call and would like to see its implementation.
To do this I have to switch to, or open, the corresponding file, locate the method definition in the file. Once examined, I may want to go back to where I was before.
Eclipse has this smart and powerful ability to change an identifier into a hyper text link. One simply move the pointer over the identifier and press the control key at the same time. The identifier changes into a hyper text link (underlined blue text) and a click moves you directly on the method implementation.
In visual, you get a context menu when clicking on an identifier and then you have to locate and click the "go to definition" menu command. Two clicks.
DITP is flexible, versatile and simple because it uses the inter-object communication model. Not only for the user needs to communicate with its service, but also to setup and configure the connection data processing (i.e. authentication, encryption, compression, logging, tunneling,...).
Inter-object communication
By adopting the inter-object communication model users can create any type of service (remote object) they want. They can also extend or refine their capabilities by using inheritance with the polymorphism property and preserve backward compatibility at the same time.
This makes DITP versatile and flexible, but any other inter-object communication protocol could claim the same.
Configuring and setting up the connection
What makes DITP different is that the connection configuration and setup are also performed by using the object oriented model. The different algorithms used are controlled by specific services and the client controls them by invoking the appropriate methods.
This makes the protocol very flexible and versatile since the algorithm can be combined and configured in any way. It is easy to add support for new algorithms and there is no constrain on the transaction polka required to configure them.
This design choice basically factorizes and parameterizes the protocol. What is left for DITP to define is how to open a connection, how to exchange messages between client and services and how to setup a new client-service binding.
Opening the DITP connection
Opening a DITP connection implies a very simple transaction where the client and the service side exchange a four byte message. If both message contain the expected value, the connection is considered opened. It can hardly be made simpler.
When the connection is opened the client and service implicitly attach a channel control service to the connection. This service has very few methods. One is used to close the connection and the other to request the attachment of another service whose type and identity are given as argument.
That is all it takes to have an operational DITP server. The exchanged messages have also a very simple structure, but will be described in another note because they have another original feature allowing to minimize latency.
Once the connection is opened, if the client wants to secure the connection by adding authentication or encryption, he request the attachment of the corresponding services and configure them by calling their methods.
This is why I claim that DITP is versatile, flexible and simple.
The DITP protocol has been designed to minimize the time required to setup an operational connection. This is achieved by a simple method which is made explicit in the following figure.
In common protocols, like HTTP and SMTP, the server is expected to send a greeting before the client can respond and proceed by sending its first request.
The time the client has to wait for this greeting message is usually dominated by the round trip time. In a LAN the round trip time is less than a millisecond, but on Internet it will take many tens of milliseconds and sometime hundreds of millisecond if the server is on another continent.
By simply swapping the DITP open transaction orientation, we save one round trip time delay before the client can sent its first transaction request. Another advantage of this method is that the server can use a very narrow timeout window for the arrival of the DITP connection setup request. This protects against some type of DOS attacks.
There are two additional things we can observe from the previous figure.
1.- The HTTP or SMTP protocol could be optimized by allowing the client to send its first data without having to wait for the server greeting.
2.- The round trip time due to TCP could be avoided if we could combine it with the DITP connection set up and the two first requests. There is clearly room for improvement on this layer, but this is out of scope regarding this project.
The choice to make IDR a binary data representation was not easy to make because it is not in the current trend. The following very interesting article comfort me in my choice "8 Reasons why XML sucks".
One fundamental question is the encoding of a time value. A time value has two types of use. One is as time stamp and the other is just as a general time reference.
Requirements
On one hand, a time stamp has the requirement to have a well defined and controlled precision, while the covered time span can be limited (i.e. +/- 200 years). On the other hand, a general time reference needs to be applicable to a very large time span, with less constrains on the precision limit.
Options
For the time reference value one could use a double precision float representation with seconds as units. All arithmetic operations are provided right out of the box and generally hardwired in the processor. Conversion to calendar time is trivial since one simply has to extract the integer part of the value and convert it to a time_t value. From there one can use the common calendar time conversion and formatting functions.
For time stamps, using integers seems preferable. But we still have a choice between a split encoding like the timeval structure, a 64bit fixed point encoding, or an integer with very small time unit (i.e. nanoseconds).
Discussion
There is not much to discuss about the absolute time. Using a double precision float is an optimal solution. For time stamps however we have three different solutions.
From my experience, I've seen that split time encoding like the timeval structure is not convenient to use when dealing with time arithmetics. It is even error prone if the user has to program the operations himself.
I also tried to implement a fixed point time encoding class with the decimal point between bit 29 and 30. But this is tricky to get right and some operations are not trivial to implement correctly. This is because fractional computation requires normalization and optimal rounding errors handling.
A 64bit integer using nanoseconds as time units is apparently the most simple and straightforward time stamp encoding. Converting to seconds is done with a simple 64bit integer division which is also hardwired in most recent processors. Conversion to other time units like microseconds, milliseconds, days or week is as accurate and simple. Multiplication or division with decimal scalar values is also trivial.
Another advantage of the 64bit integer nanosecond values is that there is no need of special functions to do the conversions or operations. A programmer can easily figure out what to do and use conventional arithmetic operations.
With a 64 bit signed integers with nanosecond units, the covered time span is over +/- 292 years range. One can thus afford keep the current time_t January 1970 epoch and push back the wrapping limit far away.
Conclusion
In DIS, we'll thus use a double precision float for general time reference value and a 64bit integer with nanosecond units for time stamps and delays encoding.
Note: I've seen the use of a double precision float for time encoding in some Windows operating system API. I still have to see the use of a 64bit signed integer with nanosecond units. It would make sense as an upgrade of time_t which is required since we are getting close to the wrapping limit.Update : It has been brought to my attention that Java stores time values in a signed 64bit integer with milliseconds as time units relative to January 1, 1970. The covered time span is thus +/- 290 million years. I'll stay with the nanosecond units for time stamps.
It is time for a new communication duty on my project. It's still in a steady progress but not as fast as I would like. I now use the latest version of libgc. I spent most of my time last month searching the source of a major memory leak. I finally found out that it was caused by STL containers. I changed the code and now use gc_allocator. Even strings had to be changed. Now the client and server run without any memory leak. I thought of changing language (i.e. D) but I didn't want to cut myself away from the C++ community as potential users. So I had to sort out the problem and I finally did.
The client service communication model is now finalized and under test. The system is ready to support transmitted data processing (compression, authentication and encryption).
In this note I'll explain the encoding of a key data type I name cardinality. A cardinality is the number of elements in a sequence. Because of its efficient encoding I extended its use to other type of information. What makes a cardinality different from a classical unsigned integer is that small values are much more frequent than big values. Consider for instance strings. Most strings will be less than 256 bytes in length but from time to time big strings may show up.
We could thus benefit from an encoding that is compact for small values and eventually bigger for big values. I spent some time investigating all the possible encodings I could find and the most interesting ones have been found in BER and in ICE.
BER's cardinality encoding
BER stands for Basic Encoding Rules and is used in SNMP and x509 certificates encoding. In this encoding the cardinality value is chopped in 7 bits chunks and stored in as many bytes in big endian order. The leading bytes with value 0 are dropped. The most significant bit of all the bytes is set to one, except in the last byte where it is set to 0 and signals the last byte.
I implemented a BER encoder and decoder a long time ago and, as attractive as this encoding might be, it is not trivial to do and it requires some bit manipulations on bytes which makes it not optimal in term of performance.
ICE's cardinality encoding
ICE is an inter-object communication protocol which is really worth looking at and eventually use until DITP is available ;). Check their web site for more information.
ICE was apparently initially inspired by IIOP that simply doesn't have a cardinality. Sequence length are encoded as a straight 4 byte integer. But ICE encodes classes and method names as strings which are generally short. The 4 byte encoding overhead was very clear. So the designer of ICE's encoding added a small change in it that significantly increased its efficiency.
If the cardinality value is less than 255, the value is stored in a single byte. Otherwise a byte with the value 255 is written and followed by the 4 byte value encoding the cardinality value. Encoding and decoding is trivial and much more efficient then the BER encoding. It is not as compact for values bigger or equal to 255, but the overhead is insignificant when considering the amount of data that follows (i.e. string).
IDR's cardinality encoding
IDR extends the idea found in ICE by supporting 8 byte encoding and the intermediate 2 byte integer size. As with ICE, if the value is smaller than 255 the cardinality is encoded as a single byte. If less than 65535, it is encoded in a total of three bytes. The first byte holds the value 255 and the cardinality value is stored in the following 2 bytes as a classical unsigned integer. If the value is bigger, it is followed by a 4 byte value, etc. up to the 8 byte integer.
The encoding is as trivial and efficient as the one of ICE, if we take care to detect and encode small values first. It is more compact for values up to 65535, and then becomes less efficient because big values have a long encoding size. But as already pointed out, this overhead is insignificant when considering the amount of data that follows.
Use of cardinality in IDR
The cardinality encoding is so efficient that it its use has been extended for other types of information. Here is a short list of them.
- Object references in serialized object aggregates are encoded as cardinality because a reference is simply the object index number in the sequence of serialized objects. The value 0 is reserved for the null reference and the first serialized object is thus identified by the reference value 1. Small reference values are expected to be the most frequent.
- Methods are identified by a number instead of a string as is common place with inter-object communication protocol. The encoding is much more compact and efficient to handle and, on the server side, the method call dispatching becomes simple and efficient because the identifier can be used as an index in a method pointer table. Encoding the method identifier as a cardinality was an obvious solution since small values will be the norm.
- A channel can host multiple concurrent client-service connections. These bindings are identified by a unique number, starting with 1 and incrementing for each new binding. We can expect that most frequent binding identification will have a small value and thus the use of cardinality encoding imposed itself.
The progress may be slow but the benefit is that taking the time to think and explore the possible solutions for every choice yields a better thought out product.
Paul Buchheit provides additional thoughts on what makes a startup successful. A good team ? A good idea ? A good execution ? Which one is more important, which is less ? He compares it to climbing a mountain with a gold pot at the top. A good analogy.
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