03 Aug 10 It’s a blog.

Not really a lot to say at this point that people already know, so I suppose I’ll just blog so that people know we’re still alive and kicking. Fewer svn commits than usual of late because there’s nothing left for me to do at this point. As a result, I’ve been hard at work on libZER, the Zentific EFL RPC library, which is what v2.0 of our zrpc database server will use. This will be a full rewrite of libzxr, which itself is a fork of libxr.
The key points I’ve been focusing on for ZER 1.0 are as follows

Integrating Eina and Ecore from the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL), a well-known set of open source libraries which are built around the ideas of maximum speed and stability.

Replacing bloated unnecessary glib with Eina: the EFL data type library. Here’s my favorite thing about the switch:
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 791K 2010-07-09 06:33 /usr/lib/libglib-2.0.so.0.2400.1
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 143K 2010-08-02 14:20 /usr/lib/libeina-ver-pre-svn-07.so.0.9.9


Replacing blocking socket io with asynchronous reads and writes using Ecore_Con

Replacing the current multi threaded server implementation with a much more efficient event-driven implementation using Ecore’s main loop. This will result in all function calls becoming asynchronous wherever possible, creating shorter response times for clients by avoiding blocking io and cpu sharing between threads.

Replacing JSON-glib, which currently only runs on some of our supported platforms, with cJSON, which will be linked directly into libZER to remove external dependencies. Based on the benchmarks I’ve done, the cJSON parser is at a minimum 10x faster.

That’s not all we’re overhauling/upgrading though! We’ve got KVM integration nearly complete, and our VMWare support is quickly becoming the most extensive of anyone outside of VMWare themselves. We’re also planning ahead for other database modules to interface with other types of databases.

Naturally our primary focus at this time is still the 1.0 release that always seems just out of reach, but since I have nothing interesting to share on that front I thought I’d give a teaser of things to come. Stay tuned!

Reader's Comments

1. Nux | 03 Aug 2010 5:10 am

   /me is drooling
   C’mon guys, you can do it!

2. Bart Coninckx | 05 Aug 2010 5:42 am

   Eagerly awaiting …

3. mike | 13 Aug 2010 4:44 pm

   Wait no more! Zentific is now in alpha!

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