Non-determinism Pains in Open Standards

The road to hell, they say, is paved with good intentions. For protocols, the intentions are usually: to “make it simple” to “integrate it into the existing system” or to “allow it to work independently” Where the “hells” are, respectively: under-defined standards inconsistencies ambiguities It’s very hard to write a standard that avoids all these. In fact, if I took the time, I could prove that from the theorem “any (read more...)

By Ran Arad  |  July 30th, 2008  |  Filed under Development, Standardization
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Google’s protocol

After the last post about text and binary protocols, Sagee sent me a link to Google’s protocol buffers, which is a protocol used to send structured data over the network, which also provides backwards compatibility between versions. From the announcement: “XML? No, that wouldn’t work. As nice as XML is, it isn’t going to be efficient enough for this scale. When all of your machines and network links are running at capacity, XML is an extremely expensive proposition. Not to (read more...)

By Ran Arad  |  July 23rd, 2008  |  Filed under Development, Interoperability, Standardization
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The binary of text protocols

A while ago, Paul E. Jones, the prophet of AMS, mentioned that AMS would use XML encoding: “We just finished a meeting yesterday. During the meeting we reached agreement to use XML for this new system. Personally, I think that’s going to be very cool. There is a huge amount of tool support for XML. We also had a person from the W3C attend who shared information on the Efficient XML Interchange (http://www.w3.org/XML/EXI/). In theory, this allows one to create (read more...)

By Ran Arad  |  July 16th, 2008  |  Filed under Interoperability, Standardization
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4 Gotcha’s of text-based protocols

As I stated many times, I think binary encoding is superior to text based encoding. However, usually, when you are a software engineer implementing a protocol, the protocol choice is not yours. In this post, I will consider the pitfalls and gotcha’s of text-based protocols and how to design your way around them. I mostly consider protocols defined by ABNF rules (such as SIP). If the protocol uses an XML scheme, there are readily available documents on parsing XML into (read more...)

By Ran Arad  |  July 3rd, 2008  |  Filed under Development, SDKs
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