[SAMZA-429] Decouple Protocol from Task

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Open
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Unresolved
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Jonathan Herriott
• Created: 13/Oct/14 18:43
• Updated: 14/Jan/15 22:44

Description

Maybe someone can point me in the right direction if this is wrong. One thing I've disliked about tasks is the fact that the protocols have to be baked directly into the Task, so if you want to process JSON, you have to treat the message contents as a HashMap, but if you want to use Avro, it needs to be treated as a GenericRecord object, etc. I think it would be super beneficial to fully abstract this from the Task object and just treat each thing as a "Message" object. I think the advantage of this is that you can test with JSON and run with Avro in production or whatever as debugging with JSON is a lot easier than Avro.

The thing is, in the Task, I only care about the structure, I don't really care about what protocol it is. Maybe this statement is a bit naive, but I don't think there would ever be a good situation in which you would pass just a string or integer or whatever instead of some form of hierarchical message. In my opinion, all Serde should return a common interface for a Record for deserialization.

Issue Links

• is related to: SAMZA-484 Define the serialization/deserialization format for stream tuple