Complex services through BLE with client codegen in other languages

[gazialankus]

I was wondering if anyone thought of creating full fledged services in BLE that act like RPC calls with all the bells and whistles.

I use Serverpod as a Dart/Flutter backend and its awesome. Much like its endpoints, it would be lovely to be able to create BLE services in Toit and auto generate Dart client code. We could write the service in Toit, codegen its Dart code and abstract away all the BLE details.

[floitsch]

I don't think anyone has worked on this, but the following code might be useful to you:
https://github.com/toitware/toit-provision/blob/main/src/src_/rpc.toit

Basically, it's an RPC entry-point for BLE. The easiest example is the version.toit one. Other RPCs there use protobuf.

If you don't want to use protobuf, but rather generate code from a given Toit file, you could try to write an LSP client and get the outline from a Toit file and work with that. For example, you could say that any RpcService that any static member prefixed with "MSG-TYPE-" is a message type that can be sent to the service. The github.com/toitlang/toit repository has a small LSP client which we use for testing. I don't think it would be hard to extract it from there.

[gazialankus]

It's amazing that you already wrote an RPC service on top of BLE! Thank you for pointing me to it.

Also, sorry, I'm totally in the wrong repo's discussion.

I hope I can find time to work on this. A solid stack on top of BLE would save so much headache. Protobuf makes a lot of sense. I think the next step is to put together code in the Dart side and call such RPCs. It seems there were relevant efforts blerpc and protoble with other platforms.

Very exciting!

[floitsch]

Credit, where credit is due: that package was initially written by Espressif engineers.