Agnos is developed and maintained by IBM XIV, at the Host Side Group, to allow our end users to utilize our products with ease, from a variety of programming languages. We develop Storage Array management APIs, mostly in python, and we had to allow our clients (who use more “solid” languages, such as java or C++), to natively invoke these APIs.
The task of exposing hierarchal object-oriented APIs turned out rather complex, and we spent much time investigating the available, open, and standardized RPC technologies (e.g., SOAP, CORBA, ZeroC ICE, Protocol Buffers, and others). Sadly, all failed to meet our needs, being technologically inferior, topologically unmaintainable, or having licensing issues. The closest contestant was Apache Thrift, which was lightweight and seemed to do everything we needed, except for passing objects by-reference.
Trying to reinvent the wheel as little as possible, we sought to augment Thrift’s deficiency by a writing a preprocessor that converts class properties and methods into “plain old functions”, and then used Thrift to actually generate the binding code. We planned to get this feature incorporated into the Thrift compiler, but with time it became clear that this approach is not progressing well, and in April 2010, Agnos was born.
As such, Agnos is loosely modeled after Thrift, both in its architecture and terminology. It is important to stress, however, that the two projects do not share code or are otherwise related, and that the Apache license (which Thrift is released under) allows derivative works.
IBM chose to open-source Agnos, under the Apache License, believing that such a project would do a great service to the open source community – just as we would have wished to find a suitable open source project instead of writing one from scratch.
We also hope this would help Agnos mature faster, receiving bug reports and patches from users, maybe even new features. For more information, please refer to the Contribution Guidelines.
