In my company around 2008-2010, all our servers and apps used a muxed connection over tcp, carrying protocol buffers, for many of the same reasons. We stepped away from that at some point, since http maintainability (more, simpler libs, easier debugging etc etc) + improved 3G connection speeds, simply no longer made that technology stack economically viable to maintain, but it was great technology and made those apps perform a lot better than the competition back then.

Good times.... and nice to see that the same basic principles still make sense if u have the money to invest into that.

DJ


On 10 mrt. 2016, at 16:59, Joaquin Oltra Hernandez <jhernandez@wikimedia.org> wrote:

Crazy engineering. They've rebuilt the internet (network layer and a browser) for their app...

The Lite client is a simple VM that provides various capabilities to interact with the OS (such as read a file, open the camera, create an SQLite database, and so on) and a rendering engine to drive the Android UI. Product code is written on the server and is expressed in terms of the capabilities the client has. Resources are sent down from the server as needed and cached. So it has infinite scalability for building additional product without bloating the APK.


On Wed, Mar 9, 2016 at 3:54 PM, Gilles Dubuc <gilles@wikimedia.org> wrote:
https://code.facebook.com/posts/1365439333482197/how-we-built-facebook-lite-for-every-android-phone-and-network

"To achieve an extremely byte-efficient wire protocol, instead of using HTTPS, Lite uses a custom message protocol over TLS (directly over TCP). One of the biggest pain points in a 2G network is that establishing a connection can be very slow; it can take multiple seconds. As most Lite traffic flows over a single connection to the backend, this pain point is mitigated in comparison."

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