The original idea was to post a list of movies protocol programmers would enjoy watching. Then I discovered that there are already several lists like that the same movies are in them all Therefore, I decided to do something a little bit different. I’ll have an award night for movies I like and I think you will too. First Category: Hacker movies Hacking is probably the most exciting aspect of programming, so no wander movies use the hacking
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By Ran Arad | August 20th, 2008 | Filed under Development
So I was instant messaging my wife the other night. We were both in the living room, with a laptop in each lap, and we could just talk, but we used IM instead. Now, Mrs. Code of Contact is a great at multi-tasking - she is known to have two IM conversations going on while she is talking on the phone and watching TV (Happy Birthday dear). So sending her an IM is the best way for me to get
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By Ran Arad | August 15th, 2008 | Filed under Standardization
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
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By Ran Arad | July 23rd, 2008 | Filed under Development, Interoperability, Standardization
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
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By Ran Arad | July 16th, 2008 | Filed under Interoperability, Standardization
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
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By Ran Arad | July 3rd, 2008 | Filed under Development, SDKs
