Best approach for small scale distributed C++ apps

Question

I am working on distributing a stand-alone app. Each instance of the app has to be able to send and receive queries.

Requirements:

2. Language - C++
3. Scale - small. May be 5 instances at a time
4. Platform Independent
5. Volume of data transferred is expected to be high(Raw images in the worst case)

I don't want to use RPC because it needs a registry service running. I think CORBA and SOAP would be too much of an overhead. I kind of decided to use a custom protocol, but just want to hear if there's anything better.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Protocol Buffers sound like a good fit, supported in C++, cross-platform, designed for high-performance.

Answer 2

MPI was made for this and is certainly easier to use than Corba etc.
And it scales when you discover that your small scale distributed app becomes a very large scale distributed app!

Answer 3

Why not use http POST?

• Lightweight as you need (open a socket, send POST string), or if you want robustness use an http library.
• Easy to manage permissions on the serverside (just use apache or iis)
• Built in logging (on the webserver side)
• No scaling problems (webservers have solved these problems)
• Typically systems don't require permissions for http sockets (xp does for raw sockets).
• Key/value pairs for identifying fields and data.
• You can test it using firefox plugins.
• If speed is a concern you can easily set timeouts and resend.
• You don't have to worry about firewalls since http is almost always allowed by default.
• Simple to debug with a port sniffer.
• All of the server side code and most of client side code has been written for you.