Description
The current Network Receiver API makes it slightly complicated to right a new receiver as one needs to create an instance of BlockGenerator as shown in SocketReceiver
https://github.com/apache/spark/blob/master/streaming/src/main/scala/org/apache/spark/streaming/dstream/SocketInputDStream.scala#L51
Exposing the BlockGenerator interface has made it harder to improve the receiving process. The API of NetworkReceiver (which was not a very stable API anyways) needs to be change if we are to ensure future stability.
Additionally, the functions like streamingContext.socketStream that create input streams, return DStream objects. That makes it hard to expose functionality (say, rate limits) unique to input dstreams. They should return InputDStream or NetworkInputDStream.