Share application specific data types with server and client

Question

Hi all,

I have to create a server(java) - client(c++) system, both server and client will have to work with objects (data types) wich are the same for the client and for the server, for example a car object will be created on the client side and then send to the server where aditional calculations will be done on the car object. What i would like to do is to create one universal implementation of the car object and than use this implementation within the server and the client. First i thought about creating a dll (in c++) with all data types wich are same for the client and the server, but this solution has a drawback. Because this solution only works under Windows OS and i have to support Win,Mac,Linux. So is there a multiplatform solution for my problem ?

I give my thanks to all your replyes.

Answer 1

Take a look at CORBA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CORBA

Answer 2

Provided you stick to standard libraries (cross platform), you shouldn't have any difficulty recompiling your library (DLL) as shared libraries (.so) on OS X and Linux. Of course, loading them in Java is a different issue (which I don't have any expertise in).

However, more importantly, in your case of a client server application, you probably want to look into effective serialization of your objects so that they can transmitted over the network and reliably reconstructed by the receiver.

Answer 3

Google has an Open Source library called Protocol Buffers for transferring data objects between clients and servers as in your situation. It support C++, Java and Python.

Answer 4

as well as protocol buffers, there is another one called thrift (facebook's protocol buffers). see http://incubator.apache.org/thrift/

see this page for a comparison http://stuartsierra.com/2008/07/10/thrift-vs-protocol-buffers

Answer 5

This looks like a good job for XML. That's where I would start.