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Introduction

Apache Geode is a

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data management platform that provides real-time, consistent access to data-intensive applications throughout widely distributed cloud architectures. While it currently has high-speed client interfaces for Java, C++ and .NET there is both a need to create lighter-weight clients and a demand to access Geode from

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other programming languages.

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Unfortunately the the existing client-server protocol is

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undocumented. It evolved over time and is overly complex to meet either of these needs.

This document describes a new, lighter-weight client/server protocol that may be implemented in phases, moving from a "basic client" to a more advanced "smart client". It endeavors to provide a protocol that is also more amenable to more modern APIs such as those using asynchronous or reactive patterns.

You will notice that this document describes the protocol down to the level of byte-ordering and "bytes on the wire". This is a description of the native serialization of the protocol that will be used for the initial implementation. It is our intent to make this pluggable so that alternative serialization technologies may be used instead, such as protobuf or thrift. How that is done will be left as a goal for the architecture of the server component, with an additional goal of providing an IDL description of the protocol.

At the same time we realize that serialization of application keys, values, callback arguments, function parameters and so forth are a separate matter and are not necessarily tied to the serialization protocol used for client/server messaging. The initial protocol will support primitive types such as scalars, strings and byte-arrays. It will also support JSON documents as values and convert between these and Geode PDX-serialized objects in the servers.

Goals

Here are the high level goals.

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