[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: [hybi] WebSocket and metadata (Was: BWTP Proposal - Bidirection Web Transfer Protocol)



Greg Wilkins wrote:
> The additional code needed
> to modify an existing HTTP parser to BWTP should be no more than a
> few lines of code.

I think it's disingenuous to portray BWTP as a few lines of code,
because nobody worries about a "HTTP parser", and nobody uses a "HTTP
parser library" which would be changed for BWTP.

Implementations are always a server, client or both, with the "parser"
being some trivial little part that really is not worth discussing.

Most servers only parse requests and emit responses, and dispatch those
requests and responses in a particular way, often with multiple
processes or threads, or sometimes in sequence.

BWTP changes that pattern quite significantly, and that's where the
interesting part goes.

Of course any bi-directional protocol we're discussion does the same.

The point is that with the effort to build something which handles
bi-directional messaging, the actual *parser* is not likely to be
something to worry about.  Really, the tricky stuff is in keeping
sockets alive, timeouts, flow control, orderly shutdowns, retries,
handling protocol errors.

That stuff applies with any of the bi-directional protocols, even the
ones which haven't said anything about it because they haven't been
implemented and tested yet.  Some of them expect Javascript
applications to deal with it (which imho is a nice way to ensure low
quality implementations.)

-- Jamie

Note Well: Messages sent to this mailing list are the opinions of the senders and do not imply endorsement by the IETF.