Ryan, would you mind pointing us to any doc or history articulating why you feel Avro is preferable for "data storage and anywhere else we currently do custom serialization"? Your experiences would be valuable input for work I hope to soon begin.
Thank you, David -----Original Message----- From: Ryan King [mailto:r...@twitter.com] Sent: Tuesday, December 28, 2010 2:10 PM To: client-...@cassandra.apache.org Cc: dev@cassandra.apache.org Subject: Re: Avro RPC? On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 9:42 AM, Edward Capriolo <edlinuxg...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 11:30 AM, Eric Evans <eev...@rackspace.com> wrote: >> On Wed, 2010-12-22 at 11:00 -0600, Eric Evans wrote: >>> So, Avro RPC. Is anyone using this? Is there anyone interested in >>> seeing it maintained? >>> >>> I'm concentrating on CQL[1][2], which for me will culminate in the >>> creation of a new, application-specific transport, one that doesn't >>> use either of the frameworks. To me, the existing RPC framework is >>> just something to piggy-back on until things are otherwise working, >>> and I'm starting to think Thrift might be a better piggy here (read: >>> it has more momentum). >> >> There hasn't been very many people sounding off on this, but those that >> have seem to be OK with calling it quits on the Avro interface. Since I >> brought this up during the holiday season, I'll give it another week >> just in case someone who really cares has been offline. >> >> To be clear though, I'm not really interested in pushing this forward >> anymore, so it's not enough to simply want it, we need someone(s) >> willing to step up. >> >> -- >> Eric Evans >> eev...@rackspace.com >> >> > > > @Eric I agree with many of your sentiments. > > The "avro summary" was/is somewhere between wishful thinking and > educated guesswork. In ~ May 2010 a shiny new Avro project went top > level apache status. Meanwhile thrift had no full time committers and > had some glaring bugs that had been open in thrift 0.4.0 (some around > php) that annoyed everyone. > > However thrift did have a release 0.5.0. There are some projects that > use thrift, Hbase, Cassandra, and Hive. Thrift still delivers on > bindings for a number of languages. > > Avro is in catchup mode to thrift. They are still evolving the > project, while still trying to add support for more languages. As far > as I can tell there is no flagship project build around Avro > end-to-end. > > It would be a shame to see the Avro support go away from Cassandra > because of all the hard work that was put into it. However the > maintenance cost might outweigh it's benefits. Agreed. Thrift's progress has improved a lot since we first talked about using Avro RPC. In the meantime Avro RPC progress has slowed (the focus is on the Avro storage implementations). I think it'd be fair to give up on Avro RPC for client rpc for now*. It doesn't deliver enough over Thrift anymore. -ryan * I'm still a fan of using avro for data storage and anywhere else we currently do custom serialization
