Archived

This forum has been archived. Please start a new discussion on GitHub.

Is there a chance to use a custom XML based protocol with ICE ?

This is no ICE versus SOA, SOAP, CORBA, TAO, XML-RPC, ___ (throw in your most favourite technology from bullshit bingo) question. I found really enough documents about that in the forums and the internet.

We are using at the moment ICE as the only networking technology in our servers. And we are really, really happy with it.

We have now the problem to connect an already existing client to our system. This client is written in Macromedia Flash. It's not a tiny internet game, but a full featured call center frontend system. (And btw. it's the best designed frontent I have ever seen. Completely built by graphic designers, multimedia artists and usability experts.)

The only drawback is that there's no ICE for flash;-)
We can only talk in a XML-RPC-like manner with this clients.

Because I do not like an uncontrolled growth of our codebase the question arose whether there is a chance to use the existing ICE infrastruktur to handle this custom protocol.

Because I doubt the answer will be "yes", some more questions:

Is it a good idea to mix ICE and ACE in one binary?

Are there any good networking libraries that does not interfere ICE?

Would it be a better aproach to write a custom flash to ICE connector?

Kind regards,
Markus

Comments

  • matthew
    matthew NL, Canada
    Without knowing much about your protocol its hard to say, however, you as an end-user really only have one possibility and that is to bridge between your XML/RPC calls and the Ice protocol. This entails writing either a custom bridge for your particular project, or a generic bridge which is capable of bridging any application. Custom bridges are simpler and more direct, generic bridges are reusable.

    Another solution is for guys to sponsor a Ice for flash and then rewrite the communications portions of your Flash app.