I am making a (very basic) distributed application that has a Python server and a C# client talking to each other via json over ZeroMQ. When a method is invoked in client, it composes a message and sends it to the server where a corresponding function is executed, so it's basically a sort of an RPC.
To understand what to do with the messages, the app relies on a 'protocol' (in fact a set of keywords) which is duplicated on client and server side, something like this:
namespace Draftsocket
{
public static class Protocol
{
public struct ClientAction
{
//client-issued action lines
public const string CMD = "COMMAND";
public const string ERROR = "CLIENT_ERROR";
public const string EVENT = "EVENT";
public const string CONTINUE = "CONTINUE";
public const string CONSOLE = "CONSOLE";
}
...etc...
class Protocol(object):
class ClientAction:
CMD = "COMMAND"
ERROR = "CLIENT_ERROR"
EVENT = "EVENT"
CONTINUE = "CONTINUE"
CONSOLE = "CONSOLE"
...etc...
(link to complete file in Python)
This is then used to compose and read messages, like this:
public static ClientMessage NewCommand(string Name)
{
return new ClientMessage(Protocol.ClientAction.CMD, Protocol.Status.OK, Name);
}
This works for the time being but is generally awful: stringly-typed and inconvenient for anyone who will want to use the application as a framework to build on.
I can't decide on how to refactor this protocol in a way that would either automate/sync to each other the language-specific implementations or, for example, fire up a warning if the protocol are out of sync/outdated?
Guess that I should look into Enums and/or something of the sort MessagePack implements, but I don't feel qualified enough to proceed on my own with this.
TIA.
