Rinzler

Binary over websockets:

docker pull ddoronin/rinzler

If you have a local instance of MongoDB up and running on 27017 (by default) you can use this command to run docker on http://localhost:8080:

docker run --rm -it -p 8080:80 -p 27017:27017

Motivation

Today in the World of Big Data and IoT one of the key challenges is how to store data so it could be queried effeciently in many different ways. Evolution of databases toward NoSQL helped to reduce overhead of normalization. Changes in data schema are not pain any more. To achive this, for instance, Mongo is relying on schema-less tree structure stored as binary JSON (BSON).

Traditionally back-end was required to parse database data (BSON for mongo), transform it into Java/C#/JavaScript or any other language objects in memory, than serialize in JSON and send it to a web browser over HTTP. All these layers of parsing, transformations and serializations take time and computational resources.

With rinzler it's not a case any more! Grab BSON and pass it throught as is!

Proposition

Client-server communications in BSON over websockets or HTTP/2 should reduce web trafic and optimize back-end resources usage.

What is BSON?

https://www.mongodb.com/blog/post/bson

BSON is a binary serialization of JSON-like documents. BSON stands for “Binary JSON”, but also contains extensions that allow representation of data types that are not part of JSON. For example, BSON has a Date data type and BinData type.

The key advantage over XML and JSON is efficiency (both in space and compute time), as it is a binary format.

BSON can be compared to binary interchange formats, such as Protocol Buffers. BSON is more “schemaless” than Protocol Buffers – this being both an advantage in flexibility, and a slight disadvantage in space as BSON has a little overhead for fieldnames within the serialized BSON data.

Why is Mongo?

MongoDB is a perfect example, because internally it's relying on BSON, every document is stored as BSON and can be passed throught in this raw binary format.

Workflow

┌─────────┐ REQUEST ┌─────────┐ QUERY   ┌─────────┐
│ BROWSER │ ~~~~~~> │ SERVER  │ ~~~~~~> │  MONGO  │
└─────────┘ H+BSON  └─────────┘ BSON    └─────────┘
  ^  ^  ^                                   |
  |  !  :                              cursor.next() != Nil
  |  !  :                                   |
 READ BSON <---------------------------  { 1010 }
     !  :      STATUS [OK]                  |
     !  :      BODY   [BSON]                |
     !  :      INDEX  [0]                   |
     !  :                                   |
     !  :  ...    < N times >     ...  cursor.next() != Nil
     !  :                                   |
 READ BSON <---------------------------  { 1010 }
        :      STATUS [OK]                  |
        :      BODY   [BSON]                |
        :      INDEX  [N-1]                 |
        :                              cursor.next() == Nil
        :                                   |
 READ BSON <---------------------------  { 0000 }
               STATUS [COMPLETED]
               INDEX  [N]

Today web browsers are able to handle binary data effeciently with Typed Arrays, Buffers and WASM.

rinzler is demonstrating two-way client-server communication over web sockets using BSON without additional layers of translation between JSON, BSON and back-end objects.

Protocol

See bytable

Client

Header	Size	Description
MARKER_SIZE	UInt8	Size of requestId to be used to trace a response.
MARKER	MARKER_SIZE	Request Id.
BODY_SIZE	UInt32	Size of payload.
BODY	BODY_SIZE	Payload in BSON.

Server

Header	Size	Description
MARKER_SIZE	UInt8	Size of requestId.
MARKER	MARKER_SIZE	Client requestId.
STATUS	UInt8	Completion status.
INDEX	UInt16	Response index.
BODY_SIZE	UInt32	Size of BSON response.
BODY	BODY_SIZE	Usually document, or error if it happened with status 1 [Error].

Status

UInt8	Binary	Description
0	x0000	Ok
1	x0001	Error
2	x0010	Completed
3	x0011	Completed with Errors

x0011 = x0001 | x0010

Docker

You can checkout the repo and build docker locally:

docker build . -t ddoronin/rinzler

Or pull the latest version from docker hub:

docker pull ddoronin/rinzler

And run it using the command:

docker run --rm -it -p 80:80 -p 27017:27017 ddoronin/rinzler

where port 80 is used to serve a web server and 27017 is a default port for mongo.

These parameters could be customized using environment variables:

• PORT=80
• MONGO_URL=mongodb://host.docker.internal:27017

By default MONGO_URL is pointing to a mongo running on the host. In production environment this should be mongo connection string. It's recommended to keep docker ports as is, but change mapped ports if needed.