Nirvana Communication Protocols and RNAMEs

Nirvana supports several Native Communication Protocols and Comet Communication Protocols.

The following table shows the Communication Protocols supported by each Nirvana Client API:

  Native Communication Protocols Comet Communication Protocols
  Socket (nsp) SSL (nsps) HTTP (nhp) HTTPS (nhps) HTTPS (https) HTTP (http)
Java yes yes yes yes N/A N/A
C# .NET yes yes yes yes N/A N/A
C++ yes yes yes yes N/A N/A
Python yes yes yes yes N/A N/A
Excel VBA yes yes yes yes N/A N/A
JavaScript N/A N/A yes
via WebSocket		 yes
via WebSocket		 yes yes
Adobe Flex yes yes yes yes N/A N/A
Microsoft Silverlight yes yes yes yes N/A N/A
iPhone yes yes yes yes N/A N/A
Android yes yes yes yes N/A N/A
.NET Compact Framework yes yes yes yes N/A N/A
Blackberry & J2ME yes yes yes yes N/A N/A

RNAMEs

An RNAME is used by Nirvana Clients to specify how a connection should be made to a Nirvana Realm Server.

A Native Communication Protocol RNAME string looks like:

<protocol> :// <hostname> :< port>,<protocol> :// <hostname> :< port>

or

<protocol> :// <hostname> :< port>;<protocol> :// <hostname> :< port>

where:

  • <protocol> can be one of the 4 available native communications protocol identifiers nsp (socket), nhp (HTTP), nsps (SSL) and nhps(HTTPS).
  • <hostname> is the hostname or IP address that the Nirvana Realm is running
  • <port> is the TCP port on that hostname that the Nirvana Realm is bound to using the same wire protocol.

The RNAME entry can contain a comma or semicolon separated list of values each one representing the communications protocol, host and port currently running on a Nirvana Realm.

Using a comma-separated list indicates in order traversal of RNAME values while using a semicolon-separated list indicates random traversal of RNAME values.

If a list of RNAMES is used and the Nirvana session becomes disconnected and cannot reconnect, the API will cascade through the RNAME list until it manages to reconnect. This functionality is particularly useful within the contexts of both clustering and failover.

Native Communications Protocol Client Extensions

In addition to the supported protocols shown above, Nirvana clients implemented with APIs that support Native Communication Protocols have a number of extensions available to them:

  • nhpsc

    This mode of https extracts any configured proxy from within the JVM settings and issues a PROXY CONNECT command via said proxy to establish a connection with the required Nirvana realm. The established connection then becomes an SSL encrypted socket connection mode and no longer uses http/https connections for each server request. If the proxy uses authentication then authentication parameters are also extracted from the JVM settings.

  • nhpm and nhpsm

    nhpm and nhpsm are multiplexed versions of the standard http and https protocols. The key difference is that any sessions established using a multiplexed RNAME only ever establish one connection to the Nirvana realm server. This is very useful for circumventing browser connection limits while supporting multiple sessions.