J5’s Blog

I managed to make it home in one piece from Vegas and dove right back into work. After getting away from messaging for a bit I have come full circle but with a little bit of a twist. In an effort to bring some of the goodness that is interprocess messaging to the interwebs – similar to what we get on the desktop with D-Bus – I am implementing the standard AMQP protocol in native JavaScript.

This along with QMF will give us the ability to send out notifications of events, monitor statistics and eventually supplement REST and XML-RPC interfaces with more efficient multi-response method calling (imagine streaming rows of data instead of waiting for the entire row set to be sent).

Above is a little hex dump web app I wrote to test the bindings. What you see is the start of the AMQP handshake. First I send the header indicating the version of the protocol I am expecting. I then get the ’start’ response back stating the capabilities of the broker I have connected to. I then send the ’start-ok’ packet indicating what auth mechanisms I support and the locale (I would also send a token if I were using a particular auth other than anonymous).

That is about as far as I have gotten but since the bindings are autogenerated from an XML description of the protocol most of the control and command classes are implemented. There are still some types I am trying to figure out how to support (the supported types are a magnitude above what was needed for D-Bus) and I need to smooth out the rough edges as well as write the higher level user bindings but I am off to a good start.

Code will be posted as soon as the project resources are approved and setup. Keep watching my blog for updates.

BTW: The slow response times in the time stamps are due to running inside of the firebug debugger and writing out the hex dumps on the fly using JQuery. It seems the more sophisticated JQuery and Firebug get, the more they butt heads.

[read this post in: ar de es fr it ja ko pt ru zh-CN ]