[ANN] Aleph 0.4.1

[Zach Tellman]

This release represents a number of incremental improvements to 0.4.0, which has been handling billions of daily requests for close to a year.  

* Documentation can be found at http://aleph.io/

* Literate examples of usage can be found at http://aleph.io/aleph/literate.html

* Comparative benchmarks can be found at https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r12&hw=peak&test=plaintext&l=4, which may or may not be relevant to your particular use case

If anyone has questions, I'm happy to answer them.

[adrian...@mail.yu.edu]

Awesome! At Vital Labs we use Aleph in production for our HTTP and (soon to be) websocket services. I have nothing but good things to say about it. It makes using Netty a breeze in Clojure. 

For an unrelated side project, I have been using Aleph to communicate over UDP with an old MMORPG called Star Wars Galaxies. Since UDP is not stream oriented, some of the architecture which make Aleph easy to reason about through Manifold for HTTP/TCP do not seem to carry over as cleanly when dealing with UDP services. 

Would you be open to writing a comprehensive UDP example for Aleph so that potential users could see how the author intends such services to be written in tandem with your other libraries, namely Manifold, Gloss, and byte-streams? 

In particular, SWG uses a convoluted protocol which involves optional XOR decryption of the body using an integer exchanged in the first packet you see from the game client (and saved for all future communication with the client until they go link dead), followed by optional decompression with DEFLATE of the body (not the header nor footer) depending on a value in the decrypted first byte of the footer, followed by variable-length (opcode driven) body decoding. To deal with the problem of unreliable transmission, you also need to ack sequenced packets before responding to a specific kind of message. Sometimes this needs to be repeated due to loss, etc. To respond you also need to invert the decoding process, so compress -> encrypt -> etc. 

Here's an overview of the protocol if you're interested in seeing the potential complexities that come up with protocols like these: http://wiki.swganh.org/index.php/Packet_Guides

Since many of these requirements break the more functional, streaming nature of Manifold's design I have found that the code quickly devolves into madness. I imagine it would be very enlightening to see how you would solve these or similar problems with Aleph. 

Thanks for the great library,

Adrian

[Zach Tellman]

Hi Adrian,

Glad to hear that you're getting good use out of Aleph.  As for the UDP side of things, if you're using it (as games often do) to reimplement half of TCP, that may not work well with the functional operators in manifold.stream.  However, using `put!`, `take!`, and a few operators from manifold.deferred like `chain` and `loop`, you should be able to easily build any arbitrary call and response logic you need.  The code you write will end up being pretty imperative, but sometimes that's just the best way to reason about your problem.

I'm not sure I'll have time to look at the spec you linked anytime soon, but I think it's reasonable to have some UDP-related code in the literate examples.  I'll think about what would be a decent use case.

Best,

Zach

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[Alan Moore]

Thanks for the awesome library!

My vote for UDP examples: mDNS (multicast DNS) or SSDP discovery protocols :-)

Alan

[Rangel Spasov]

Zach - thank you for all the work you do on Aleph, I use it every day!

[Sander]

Zach Tellman wrote (ao):

> I'm not sure I'll have time to look at the spec you linked anytime
> soon, but I think it's reasonable to have some UDP-related code in the
> literate examples. I'll think about what would be a decent use case.

Very simple chatserver/client with mosh (mobile shell) like capabilities?

Sander

[Zach Tellman]

This is considerably simpler than the suggestions in this thread, but I've written a very basic statsd client and server in the literate examples: http://aleph.io/aleph/literate.html#aleph.examples.udp.  Feedback is welcome.

On Saturday, April 2, 2016 at 11:44:53 PM UTC-7, Zach Tellman wrote:

[Alan Moore]

This is *way* better than my suggestion... thanks Zach!

Alan