Re: Let's make Lua mobile!

[Ezra Sims <ezra.sims@...>]

On 10/27/2011 11:35 AM, Stefan Reich wrote:
> Hi Ezra!
>
> Thanks for your answer!
>
> Would XMPP work for sending a frozen script (just a binary image)
> between different machines?
Yep. Jingle [1] (which most clients and libs support) allows for file 
transfer, or for small amounts of data you could just compress, 
hex-encode, and send the image as a standard message with an identifying 
prefix for the receiver to parse. I'm sure there are plenty of other 
methods supported by the protocol, those are just the two that happen to 
come to mind first.

> If yes, do you have code to do this? I
> really want to just start doing it (sending a few scripts around the
> 'net).
Not at the moment, but I doubt it would take long to come up with 
something workable. I'd start with Verse [2] (I have ready-made squishes 
and test/example code if you have trouble getting it working from the 
repo) and figure out what works from there.

> My own first idea was to use zmq for communication. But I haven't
> really started exploring it it yet, just informed myself about it a
> little. If XMPP provides useful, let's go for XMPP.
It depends completely on implementation. I probably know even less about 
zmq than you, but I do know it'll very likely be faster than XMPP if 
distributed computing is involved. XMPP does have the huge advantage of 
being a chat protocol, which makes client discovery and non-binary 
communication (state and overload notifications, handshakes, etc) 
trivial to implement.

For a lib I'd leave the connection up to the application, defining 
pluggable methods for I/O. At an application level, if I had to pick 
only one my first choice would be XMPP - it takes a *lot* of fairly 
complex work out of the picture. Set up a server, figure out a way to 
handle registration on the client level, call it good.

If speed becomes an issue under an XMPP implementation with no XEP to 
handle things better, perhaps a hybrid approach using XMPP for basic 
communication while ZMQ handles the 'dirty work' of sending and 
receiving data would work well.

There's all sorts of ways, and I'd be happy to collaborate if you'd 
like. Feel free to contact me directly.

-Ezra

[1] http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0234.html
[2] http://code.matthewwild.co.uk/verse