Support Protobuf serialization in WebFlux [SPR-15776]

[spring-projects-issues]

Greg Laubenstein opened SPR-15776 and commented

Currently there is no built in means to serialize and deserialize data objects with RPC/protobuf with reactive-web/webflux.

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Affects: 5.0.4

Issue Links:

• Add CBOR support to WebFlux #20513 Add CBOR support to WebFlux
• Provide gRPC support [SPR-16358] #20905 Provide gRPC support
• Spring REST @MVC: Add support for google Protocol Buffers resource representation format [SPR-5807] #10477 Spring REST @MVC: Add support for google Protocol Buffers resource representation format
• Add Jackson Smile support to WebFlux [SPR-15424] #19985 Add Jackson Smile support to WebFlux
• ProtobufDecoder assumes number of bytes in delimited format will not be split into chunks [SPR-17429] #21962 ProtobufDecoder assumes number of bytes in delimited format will not be split into chunks
• Support JSON streaming formats besides application/stream+json #21283 Invalid mime type application/stream+json
• Deprecate ExtensionRegistryInitializer in protobuf support [SPR-17081] #21618 Deprecate ExtensionRegistryInitializer in protobuf support

Referenced from: commits 3899b7a, 36bbbab, 36a07aa, 6b6384a

4 votes, 13 watchers

[spring-projects-issues]

Sébastien Deleuze commented

Greg Laubenstein Protobuf, even in GRPC, seems mainly based on InputStream / OutputStream blocking APIs. Are you aware of some non-blocking API we could leverage for proper integration in WebFlux?

[spring-projects-issues]

Greg Laubenstein commented

I believe: https://github.com/zeroc-ice has a generated async API.

[spring-projects-issues]

Vitaly Romashkin commented

Hi, guys. And what about Thrift RPC? Is it possible to make integration async Thrift RPC with Webflux? Created additional feature request - #21011

[spring-projects-issues]

Rossen Stoyanchev commented

Indeed the gRPC Marshaller uses InputStream and OutputStream. Of course those represent gRPC frames, so the input or output stream is naturally broken up into discrete messages. To achieve a similar effect, I found some relevant information on streaming and large data sets on the official Protobuf site:

If you want to write multiple messages to a single file or stream, it is up to you to keep track of where one message ends and the next begins. TheThe Protocol Buffer wire format is not self-delimiting, so protocol buffer parsers cannot determine where a message ends on their own. The easiest way to solve this problem is to write the size of each message before you write the message itself. When you read the messages back in, you read the size, then read the bytes into a separate buffer, then parse from that buffer.

Then I looked for some media types to indicate protobuf streming with the length-delimited format, and found a couple examples:

1. https://prometheus.io/docs/instrumenting/exposition_formats/
application/vnd.google.protobuf; proto=io.prometheus.client.MetricFamily; encoding=delimited

1. https://www.charlesproxy.com/documentation/using-charles/protocol-buffers/
application/x-protobuf; desc="http://localhost/Model.desc"; messageType="com.xk72.sample.PurchaseOrder"; delimited=true

There doesn't seem to be a standard but we can look around some more and pick something. After all supported media types are easy to customize.

For the implementation, some useful notes here led me to MessageLite#mergeFrom which checks the size and returns true or false depending on whether it has read the full message or not. We probably still have to do extra work to buffer data chunks until a full message is parsed, but that hopefully not too bad.

Using "protobuf" and "delimited" as keywords, there may be more insight or examples out there for all of the above, but it seems we have enough here to give it a try.

[spring-projects-issues]

Rossen Stoyanchev commented

Scheduling tentatively for 5.1 RC1 to give this a try.

[spring-projects-issues]

Rossen Stoyanchev commented

I've updated the title a bit, since I think this ticket is about Protobuf (de)serialization over HTTP, not as part of gRPC. Let me know if I've misunderstood, but in any case we have a separate ticket (#20905) for gRPC.

[spring-projects-issues]

Sébastien Deleuze commented

Rossen Stoyanchev Arjen Poutsma Brian Clozel I have worked on a draft commit implementing such support.

Streams are expected to use delimited Protobuf messages with the size of each message specified before the message itself as suggested by Rossen. Single values are expected to use regular Protobuf message format (without the size prepended before the message).
I have copied the behavior of mergeDelimitedFrom / writeDelimitedTo instead of using directly these high-level methods because it allows us to retrieve the size of the message before parsing it which is useful for buffer allocation and parsing + we use the same low level Protobuf primitives. It also give us the opportunity to read/write the message using ByteBuffer based Protobuf API instead of InputStream / OutputStream one, which is likely to be more efficient.

In addition to battle test stream decoding, here is the list of open questions I have identified:

• Should we use X-Protobuf-Schema and X-Protobuf-Message like Spring MVC, or customized Content-Type ?
• If we should use customized Content-Type, we need to think how can we specify delimited=true only for streams without breaking current API which seems not obvious. What about using application/stream+x-protobuf instead ?
• Support text format (and maybe JSON) at least on encoding side
• Does text/JSON stream decoding makes sense?

Thanks in advance for your feedback.

[spring-projects-issues]

Piotr Dudkiewicz commented

Sébastien Deleuze, thanks for draft commit, I've adapted it in my project and it works well.

I've found one issue though - when service returns default instance of protobuf message (which is serialized to an empty byte array by protobuf), WebClient decodes it to an empty Mono, not to Mono with default instance as I would expect (like gRPC does).

[spring-projects-issues]

Sébastien Deleuze commented

Piotr Dudkiewicz Reading https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/proto3#default and thinking about Mono semantics, this is not obvious to me that we should return a Mono with default instance, especially if we have no way on decoding side to differentiate it with empty Mono. Any thoughts?

[spring-projects-issues]

Piotr Dudkiewicz commented

Indeed there is no way to differentiate. If webmvc version of protobuf decoder works the same way
(meaning it doesn't return default instance of message) I guess it's fine for now.
It would be nice to add some info about this behaviour in docs though.

[spring-projects-issues]

Sébastien Deleuze commented

An improved version of Protobuf support will be available in Spring Framework 5.1 RC2, see this commit for more detail.