Gossip custom message data

[edwardcapriolo]

We can add a field to the message format that can be used to gossip custom data. We can have an extra field that can be a hashmap. Users can serialize anything into the map.

[hvandenb]

This is will be a good idea. Similar Akka is doing this.

[edwardcapriolo]

Yes thinking through this though I am not sure if the gossiper is the right place to exchange data. Where does the gossiper and the database/service using the gossiper begin?

[hvandenb]

Agreed that gossip is not the right protocol to exchange data. This would put additional constraints on the protocol to deal with things like consistency etc. However, there might be a good to provide additional node meta data that a client wants to exchange.

Akka adds version to do some optimization for determining newer nodes. https://gist.github.com/jboner/7692270

[edwardcapriolo]

One of the reasons I found/put together this library was I was building my own no-sql https://github.com/edwardcapriolo/nibiru. So I was thinking the place to do things like this would be in there but I am not against implementing it here.

[hvandenb]

Are you thinking about continuing this library, i.e. gossip?

[edwardcapriolo]

Yes. We can go on with the library. But I think a eventually consistent CRDT structure is something closer to a NoSQL database than a gossip library.

[hvandenb]

for sure and that would not make sense to add to this library.