Linaro Ltd.'s OpenDataPlane

James Gray — Wed, 02 Nov 2016 15:14:35 +0000

The OpenDataPlane (ODP) project is a founding initiative by the Linaro Networking Group to produce an open-source, cross-platform application programming interface (API) for the networking Software Defined Data Plane. Linaro Ltd. recently announced the availability of the first Long Term Support (LTS) Monarch release of OpenDataPlane, which will enable other projects to leverage the acceleration provided by the ODP APIs now that the code base will be fully supported for the foreseeable future.

Linaro adds that work already has begun on network protocol stacks, such as OpenFastPath (OFP), products like the nginx web server accelerated with ODP and OFP and libraries like OpenSSL that provide crypto acceleration via ODP. In addition, ODP and ODP-based products, such as OFP, nginx and OpenSSL, now can be made available as packages in popular Linux distributions like Debian, CentOS and OpenEmbedded. To accompany the release, Linaro launched a validation test suite that permits users and vendors to verify API compatibility between different ODP implementations.

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APIs

Reuven Lerner — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 21:01:55 +0000

by Reuven Lerner

If you're creating Web apps, you're designing APIs. Here are some things to keep in mind before you begin.

The Web was designed for people. When Tim Berners-Lee created the trio of standards that make up the Web—HTTP, HTML and URLs—the intention was for people to browse Web sites, submit information to them and be at the heart of the experience. But for some time now, the notion of the Web as a set of sites that people browse has been somewhat untrue. True, hundreds of millions of people visit an equally large number of sites each day; however, more and more of the visitors to sites aren't people, but programs.

Some of those programs exist to collect information on behalf of other systems. For example, when you search the Web using a site such as Google, you're obviously not searching through all of these sites in real time. Rather, you're asking Google to search through its massive index—an index that it has created and updated via its "bots", programs that go to a Web site, pretend to browse as a person, and then track whatever they find.

But more and more, the programs that are visiting sites aren't doing it on behalf of search indexes. Rather, they're doing it on behalf of...well, on behalf of themselves. Computers exchange information via the Web, using a variety of protocols and data formats. Native apps on mobile devices are using the Web behind the scenes to query Web applications. And, even those Web applications using Ajax are interacting with a Web site without directly being asked to do so.

This represents a massive shift in what Web applications are doing. No longer are we just producing HTML for users (and search bots). Now, we're producing output that's meant for programmatic consumption—and in many cases, the same people are writing the client and server sides. Sure, we could use "scraping" techniques to retrieve the HTML and search through it, but why do so? If we already know we'll be sending data to a program, there's no reason to send HTML. Rather, we can send it in a more program-friendly data format, without all the bells and whistles that people require.

When such use began, people made a big deal out of it. This trend was known as "Web services", and a lot of companies—most prominently Amazon—jumped on them, describing all sorts of standards, from XML-RPC to SOAP to WSDL. These protocols are still used, especially by large-scale enterprise applications, to communicate with one another.

But during the last few years, a more informal sort of API has emerged. Sometimes it's based on XML, but more often it's based on JSON, the "JavaScript Object Notation" format that works not only with JavaScript, but with a wide variety of other languages as well.

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