apache/spark — pull request #3146 by aarondav (2014-11-07 04:50:49+00:00)
Title: [SPARK-4187] [Core] Switch to binary protocol for external shuffle service messages

This PR elimiantes the network package's usage of the Java serializer and replaces it with Encodable, which is a lightweight binary protocol. Each message is preceded by a type id, which will allow us to change messages (by only adding new ones), or to change the format entirely by switching to a special id (such as -1).

This protocol has the advantage over Java that we can guarantee that messages will remain compatible across compiled versions and JVMs, though it does not provide a clean way to do schema migration. In the future, it may be good to use a more heavy-weight serialization format like protobuf, thrift, or avro, but these all add several dependencies which are unnecessary at the present time.

Additionally this unifies the RPC messages of NettyBlockTransferService and ExternalShuffleClient.