TCP/binary version of Java rest/web services?

Question

I'm a networking newbie and have explored a few frameworks such as Jersey and CXF for building RESTful web services in Java.

I have a new application that requires sending large amounts of binary data over the internet (between client and servers), and it needs to be extremely fast. I'm wondering if there is such a thing as a pure "TCP/IP (non-)web service", and if there are any open source Java libraries for building such things.

If all network services have to sit on top of TCP/IP, then I guess I'm looking for something that still uses binary data, but that introduces extremely little overhead for speedy service.

I always associated REST with XML or JSON; if it can be configured to be super-fast and work with binary data, I'd even be into that since I'm already somewhat familiar with Jersey.

I thought RMI might be a good choice, but not sure if it's not appropriate for this use case.

I need speed and I need a binary protocol , and not sure where to start. Any ideas? Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Can´t you go with Java Sockets?

That is how low level you can go.

http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/networking/sockets/

Yes RMI is way faster than any high level transport abstraction like CFX. You have two options, raw sockets or RMI, RMI is easier to work with.

Answer 2

REST is an architectural pattern whose distinctive trait is using the HTTP verbs for what they were originally intended to. Even if the majority of deployed REST services use JSON to serialize objects, the entire HTTP transaction looks like this:

PUT /user/foo HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com
X-Auth-Token: foobarbazanythingyouwanthere

{"fist": "Jeff", "last": "Atwood"}

And the response is:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK

So, there is no real "overhead". Instead, you exploit the capabilities of existing libraries to deal with routing, authentication, serialization, and so on. Since HTTP uses MIME-like envelops, it has no problem with binary content, and even if this adds some overhead, it's very difficult to come up with a super-efficient, yet effective protcol, not to mention that you need to design it, implement all the libraries and -well- nobody else will ever be interested in your work.

Since you state you are a "network newbie", and since you seem to use terms like REST and RMI in a random manner, my strong suggestion is not thinking about performance and just go with standard technologies. You can use HTTP, there are lots of pre-built framework, servlet containers, server stubs, you name it.

Come back when you measure real performance bottlenecks, so that we'll have the figures to better assist you.