如何在两台计算机之间传递大量数据

Question

What are possible options to transfer a lot of data from one computer to another not in the same LAN. The amount of data is about 100Mb unzipped and 2Mb zipped? Another requirement is that when I create a server for this (with C#) Java clients should be able to consume it.

• Does WCF support something like this? But if Java clients won't be able to consume it I'm not interested.
• What could be other strategies here?

Answer 1

I'd just use something common like HTTP or FTP, since there will be plenty of existing libraries to do it and you're pretty much guaranteed not to have compatibility problems. 2MB is not an unreasonably large amount of data for those protocols.

Answer 2

This is an interesting kind of question. The question is fairly simple to answer. But the interesting thing is that this kind of questions are new, they didn't exists before. Let me explain, but first I will answer your question:

You should create a server and clients both using old fashion TCP streams. To not waist bandwidth you need to compress the stream somehow, here use one of the most common compression algorithms you can find (anyone said Zip?). Now you have a language independent protocol. Clients in any language will work, mission accomplished. Also to keep it cross-platform, do not pick the best compression out there, pick the most common one (It will be good enough).

Now to why this kind of questions are interesting, they show something about OOP on the large scale. People understanding and using huge frameworks and asking if this or that framework can perform this or that simple task for them. Here we have lose our roots, we have lost the inner workings of things, it's hitting the nail not with a hammer but with a nuclear missile. It's overshooting the target, and it will produce huge applications, with huge footprint and often poor performance.

I believe that this questions has increased in number since OOP was fully adopted. It's like new programmers only want to learn these new big frameworks and that the framework dim the view of the world. There is absolutely nothing wrong with big frameworks, they are great, but I believe it's wrong to start out using them before one have mastered the basics. It's like learning to fly using a NASA space shuttle instead of a school version of a Cessna private airplane.

Answer 3

In C# you can serialize your object as an XML and transmit, on the other end your can deserialize your XML back to an object.

In terms of files size, you can transmit as zipped or 7z..and on the client decompress it before parsing the xml.

Answer 4

WCF supports SOAP and includes optional JSON serialization for XHTTP. There are other mechanisms but they are MS orientated. You will easily be able to consume the service you create. However you will have to consider how to encode the data as it will hit the wire in a non binary data friendly manner (XML/JSON).

You may wish to instead create a simple http handler that can return the data directly as zip using appropriate mime headers etc. You should then be able to just hit that using your Java client.

Answer 5

XMPP is another option. You need another server, but this could be an advantage: the client wouldn't need to know the servers IP address, server and clients would simply connect to the XMPP server to exchange message and files.

Related links (for Java):

• Openfire XMPP server
• XMPP library for java (Smack)

Answer 6

You didn't mentioned what type of data do you want to send. So for keeping things simple I will suppose that you have data stream which can be converted to byte array. Content of the stream has to be in format which is understandable to both C# and Java!

The best choice is to compress your data stream with GZip stream. Gzip should be supported on Java. Than you can send that stream converted to byte array as response from your WCF service operation. You can use default text encoding which will convert byte array into Base64 encoded string. If your java client supports MTOM (it is standard which is supported by Java) than you can use MTOM encoding which uses smaller messages.

If you don't have a stream with well known content format you have some sort of custom data. For custom data you have to use interoperable transport format which is XML. Using XML will futher increase size of your data. In that case you should consider dividing your data transfer into several calls. You can also try to host your WCF service in IIS 7.x and take advantage of its build in feature - compression of dynamic content. If your Java client calls the service with HTTP Accept-Encoding header set to compress, gzip it will automatically compress the response. Be aware that only .NET 4.0 WCF clients can work with such service.