3 ms·

One of the most surprising features of Proto mentioned in this thread (at least for me/my background) is the desire to forward on a message you receive. Possibl

• killerstorm 8y ago
  > What kind of systems have this architecture? The Web, for example. > Why would you forward on a message and not know its contents 100%? In the web architecture you can observe following cases: * proxying, which itself is an umbrella term for a lot of different things, such as: * request routing * filtering * access control * logging * caching * load balancing For example, a very typical scenario for load balancing is "sticky sessions". Basically, a reverse proxy (e.g. nginx) needs to inspect a HTTP request and analyze certain headers to find the server to forward request to (which already has user's session). Note that nginx can just pass headers without understanding what they mean. And it simply cannot understand the meaning of query part of URL or message body. So, apparently, protobuf gives you a lot of HTTP's flexibility in a binary RPC format. So e.g. you can make a cache server which will cache responses without understanding them, so you can evolve your backend without updating cache server each time you add a new field to a response. What I don't understand, however, is why they couldn't control that behavior using compiler options. Sometimes you want to be lax with validation, sometimes you don't. Why not give programmer a choice...