I often get asked about MCollective and other programming languages. Thus far we only support Ruby but my hope is in time we’ll be able to be more generic.
Initially I had a few requirements from serialization:
- It must retain data types
- Encoding the same data – like a hash – twice should give the same result from the point of view of md5()
That was about it really. This was while we used a pre-shared key to validate requests and so the result of the encode and decode should be the same on the sender as on the receiver. With YAML this was never the case so I used Marshal.
We recently had a SSL based security plugin contributed that relaxed the 2nd requirement so we can go back to using YAML. We could in theory relax the 1st requirement but it would just inhibit the kind of tools you can build with MCollective quite a bit. So I’d strongly suggest this is a must have.
Today there are very few cross language serializers that let you just deal with arbitrary data YAML is one that seems to have a log of language support. Prior to version 1.0.0 of MCollective the SSL security system only supported Marshal but we’ll support YAML in addition to Marshal in 1.0.0.
This enabled me to write a Perl client that speaks to your standard Ruby collective (if it runs this new plugin).
You can see the Perl client here. The Perl code is roughly a mc-find-hosts written in Perl and without command line options for filtering – though you can just adjust the filters in the code. It’s been years since I wrote any Perl so that’s just the first thing that worked for me.
Point is someone should be able to take any language that has the Syck YAML bindings and write a client library to talk with Mcollective. I tried the non Syck bindings in PHP and it’s unusable, I suspect the PHP Syck bindings will work better but I didn’t try them.
As mentioned on the user list post 1.0.0 I intend to focus on long running and scheduled requests I’ll then also work on some kind of interface between Mcollective and Agents written in other languages – since that is more or less how long running scheduled tasks would work anyway. This will then use the Ruby as a transport hooking clients and agents in different languages together.
I can see that I’ll enable this but I am very unlikely to write the clients myself. I am therefore keen to speak to community members who want to speak to MCollective from languages like Python and who have some time to work on this.
