JSON-RPC with a client-side library

A while ago I posted about my experiences with JSON-RPC. The conclusions were both positive and negative - JSON-RPC is a very promising protocol. Unfortunately I found that it is not so easy to find good client- and server-side libraries that support it. In particular, the JSON-RPC protocol handler in Android client needed to be implemented from scratch, without any library support.

Then one commenter proposed to check out this JSON-RPC library. Many things happened since but eventually I was able to get some first-hand experience with this library.

Click here to download the example program.

First, deploy the server part (in the server/ directory) as described at this post (actually, the server is same as the previous JSON-RPC example server). Then deploy the client part and you get the same old batch calculator functionality.

Under the hood, however, a lot of things have changed. Instead of fiddling with the JSON tokenizer and the Apache HTTP library, the JSON invocation is just one line.

double d = client.callDouble(
entry.opMethod(),
entry.getV1(),
entry.getV2() );

This simplicity comes with a price, however. The library only supports JSON-RPC 1.0 which means that there are no batch invocations and standardized exception handling. The client actually pumps the elements of the batch operation one by one into the server which could create hairy transaction consistency problems were the application a real data-intensive system. I could have refactored the server side and I could have sent the entire batch in one request (representing each operation as a JSON array sub-list) but then I would have lost JSON-RPC's simplicity on the server side.

The right way is to implement JSON-RPC 2.0 support in the library. Let's see if I or anybody else has some spare cycle in the new year for this.

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