About ecapnp

Cap’n Proto library for Erlang.

Status

Serialization should be pretty stable, also supporting packed messages.

RPC is almost complete for level 1, but not yet stable (the sample calculator application is working, both client and server).

Prerequisites

Naturally, the Cap’n Proto framework is needed in order to compile any .capnp schema files.

Misc

If you are troubleshooting a Cap’n Proto RPC communication, it may pay to be able to dissect the protocol to see what is actually being said. For that purpose, there is a Wireshark Cap’n Proto dissector.

Usage

Build and install ecapnp somewhere in you ERL_LIBS path.

Then use capnp to compile schema files to be used in Erlang:

capnp compile -oerl <schemafile.capnp>

See capnp compile --help for compile options.

It compiles the schema to a schemafile_capnp.beam module for you to use whenever you need to read/write Cap’n Proto messages.

Documentation

Read the documentation. (still butt ugly, sorry :/ )

Sample applications

In the Cap’n Proto distribution there is both a AddressBook and a Calculator example, which have been ported to Erlang using ecapnp. They live in the priv/samples directory, and may be invoked with make samples.

Tests

There are both unit tests and integration tests. The unit tests are implemented using both eunit and proper and are run using the Erlang Common Test Framework, started with the command: make tests.

The integration kind of tests are provided and run by the capnp_test framework (which is a language agnostic test framework for Cap’n Proto compiler plugins), and is invoked with the command: make check.

BUGS!!

On Windows (should you be unfortunate enough to be on that platform) there is a rather bad design decision in Erlang to convert all \r to \n that are read from stdin. Either patch beam.smp.dll, the source, or avoid reading Cap’n Proto messages from stdin.

(I used to have a patch for erl 5.9.3.1 I just might be able to dig up, in case you need it)