Designing a cross platform communication interface

Question

I have a C# program running on a local system that needs to be able to do two things.

1. Asynchronously spin off remote jobs on remote systems running Windows, Linux, or Android.
2. Provide a way for those systems to send back the output(StdOut/StdErr) of those jobs back to the local system.

Previously I have used WCF when communicating with a remote windows system. I created a WCF server on the remote windows system and then my local machine can send commands and messages via that WCF channel. Things get more complicated when I try to do the same thing with Linux and Android.

I figure I could setup a local WCF service using REST, that way all 3 platforms can send messages to it using whatever convenient language (Most likely c++) via JSON REST. But what then is the best way to accomplish requirement #1?

Should I bother creating a REST server in C++ that runs on Linux and Android? Can WCF even consume a C++ REST server that isn't written in .Net? Would I be better off doing something simple with just TCP sockets?

Security is not an issue since this is used on a secure private network. I'm just looking for the easiest way to run remote commands/processes and receive response messages from those remote systems.

Answer 1

I use ZMQ and JSON for exactly this purpose: creating a custom private network topology that communicates using JSON messages over TCP (via ZMQ). Of course you could use any serialization format (I list some alternatives below).

I can't give you a definitive "this is what you should do" answer, because the question is fairly open-ended.

• ZMQ: http://www.zeromq.org/
  • Really nice cross-platform abstracted socket library
  • Can use various transport protocols, including TCP
  • Sends messages as just plain byte arrays, leaving choice of serialization format up to you
• Some serialization formats (in order of my personal preference):
  • JSON: http://www.json.org/
  • MessagePack: http://msgpack.org/
    Exactly like JSON, but much more compact
    No schemas
    Cross-platform
  • Google Protocol Buffers: https://code.google.com/p/protobuf/
    Uses schemas
    Has bindings for C++, C#, Java, Python (at least)

Answer 2

This can really depend on your infrastructure and services you are using. If you are in the Amazon Web Services world you could use a Simple Queue Service (SQS) to receive messages. The remote systems could then poll the queue and run the jobs based on the messages pulled off the SQS queue.