Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 01/11] QMP: Introduce specification file

[Vincent Hanquez <tab@snarc.org>]

On Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 01:28:11AM -0300, Luiz Capitulino wrote:
> This file contains detailed QMP description and definitions.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Luiz Capitulino <lcapitulino@redhat.com>
> ---
>  monitor-protocol-spec.txt |  180 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>  1 files changed, 180 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
>  create mode 100644 monitor-protocol-spec.txt
> 
> diff --git a/monitor-protocol-spec.txt b/monitor-protocol-spec.txt
> new file mode 100644
> index 0000000..d20e3f9
> --- /dev/null
> +++ b/monitor-protocol-spec.txt
> @@ -0,0 +1,180 @@
> +               QEMU Monitor Protocol Specification - Version 0.1

I think this is extremelly needed however inventing yet another RPC protocol
make no sense in 2009, specially with all the limitations (no UTF-8, no quoted
string ...).

You should really look at what's already out there, so you don't have to 
concentrate on the marshalled protocol, but just the format.

At this point my personal suggestion would be jsonrpc:

- it's easy to parse (even in C)
- it's text with markup
- easy to generate
- support utf-8
- quoted string
- it's not ugly to read (compare to xml)
- can be embedded directly (no more library dependancy for qemu) in the code
- lots of language have json library making the interaction with the monitor
  easy from the other side

However i'm sure other RPC "format" exists that suit all of these too, but
again please don't do something from scratch ..

-- 
Vincent