Network Working Group M. Schwartz Internet-Draft NetTopBox, Inc. Expires: April 23, 2002 M. Rose Dover Beach Consulting, Inc. K. Carlberg University College London October 23, 2001 The APEX Publish-Subscribe Service draft-schwartz-apex-pubsub-02 Status of this Memo This document is an Internet-Draft and is in full conformance with all provisions of Section 10 of RFC 2026. Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), its areas, and its working groups. Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet- Drafts. Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress." The list of current Internet-Drafts can be accessed at http://www.ietf.org/ietf/1id-abstracts.txt. The list of Internet-Draft Shadow Directories can be accessed at http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html. This Internet-Draft will expire on April 23, 2002. Copyright Notice Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2001). All Rights Reserved. Abstract This memo describes the APEX publish-subscribe service, addressed as the well-known endpoint "apex=pubsub". The pubsub service is used to manage subscriber lists for a set of topical distribution groups, and to forward messages to group subscribers. Schwartz, et. al. Expires April 23, 2002 [Page 1] Internet-Draft The APEX Publish-Subscribe Service October 2001 Table of Contents 1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 2. Topic and Subscription Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 2.1 Defining a New Topic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 2.2 Deleting an Existing Topic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 2.3 Listing Existing Topics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 2.4 Subscribing to a Topic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 2.5 Cancelling a Subscription . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 2.6 Distributing Subscription Management . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 3. Publishing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 4. The Pubsub Service . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 4.1 Use of XML and MIME . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 4.2 The Createtopic Operation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 4.3 The Deletetopic Operation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 4.4 The Listtopics Operation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 4.5 The Subscribe Operation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 4.6 The Cancel Operation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 4.7 Data Transmissions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 4.7.1 Use of APEX Data Messages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 4.8 The Reply Operation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 5. Initial Registrations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 5.1 Registration: The Pubsub Service . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 6. DTDs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 6.1 The Pubsub Service DTD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 7. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 A. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 B. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 C. Revision History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 C.1 Changes from draft-schwartz-apex-pubsub-01 . . . . . . . . . 33 C.2 Changes from draft-schwartz-apex-pubsub-00 . . . . . . . . . 33 Full Copyright Statement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 Schwartz, et. al. Expires April 23, 2002 [Page 2] Internet-Draft The APEX Publish-Subscribe Service October 2001 1. Introduction Multicast is a form of one-to-many distribution of datagrams. Its perceived strength relies on the "network" (in whatever form it is realized), rather than the source, replicating traffic to the different receivers of a group. The replication topology is a tree of nodes overlayed on top of a physical network. Traditionally, multicast has been viewed as a network layer service in which replication is done by routers. In this document we describe an application-level multicast service. Rather than relying on IP layer multicast [1], the service distributes information through an APEX [2] "relay mesh". The APEX relaying mesh uses BEEP [3], which in turn runs on top of TCP [4]. This last point allows the service to adapt to congestion in a fashion that is TCP-friendly. An application-level multicast service could, for example, allow implementation of a messaging "exploder" that performs a single store-and-forward delivery of a group-addressed message across a trans-oceanic link, after which point messages are delivered to multiple recipients on the remote side of the link. The service can be deployed using static tree configuration, and possibly later augmented with a protocol for automating tree configuration. The service we describe is called the APEX publish-subscribe (pubsub) service. The pubsub service is used to manage subscriber lists for a set of topical distribution groups, and to forward messages to group subscribers. Schwartz, et. al. Expires April 23, 2002 [Page 3] Internet-Draft The APEX Publish-Subscribe Service October 2001 APEX, at its core, provides a best-effort datagram service. Within an administrative domain, all relays must be able to handle messages for any endpoint within that domain. APEX services are logically defined as endpoints but given their ubiquitous semantics they do not necessarily need to be associated with a single physical endpoint. As such, they may be provisioned co-resident with each relay within an administrative domain, even though they are logically provided on top of the relaying mesh, i.e., +----------+ +----------+ +----------+ +---------+ | APEX | | APEX | | APEX | | | | access | | pubsub | | presence | | ... | | service | | service | | service | | | +----------+ +----------+ +----------+ +---------+ | | | | | | | | +----------------------------------------------------------------+ | | | APEX core | | | +----------------------------------------------------------------+ That is, applications communicate with an APEX service by exchanging data with a "well-known endpoint" (WKE). APEX applications communicate with the pubsub service by exchanging data with the well-known endpoint "apex=pubsub" in the corresponding administrative domain, e.g., "apex=pubsub@example.com" is the endpoint associated with the pubsub service in the "example.com" administrative domain. Note that within a single administrative domain, the pubsub service makes use of the APEX access [5] service to determine whether an originator is allowed to manage topic and subscription information, and whether an originator is allowed to publish to a given topic. Schwartz, et. al. Expires April 23, 2002 [Page 4] Internet-Draft The APEX Publish-Subscribe Service October 2001 2. Topic and Subscription Management The APEX pubsub service manages a list of named topics and a list of subscribers for each topic, and implements delivery for group- addressed messages using the underlying APEX relay service. The pubsub service uses hierarchical topic names similar to NNTP [6] group names. Unlike NNTP's global newsgroup namespace, the pubsub service defines a distinct topic name space per administrative domain. The allocation of the topic name space, including any conventions applied at particular levels in the hierarchy, is an issue for each local administrative domain. Each administrative domain is also responsible for setting access control policy for pubsub operations, and for maintaining state on stable storage about the currently existing set of topics and subscribers for each topic. Each of the topic and subscription management operations is described in the subsections below. 2.1 Defining a New Topic When an application wants to define a new topic to which group- delivery messages can be addressed, it sends a createtopic operation to the service, e.g., +-------+ +-------+ | | -- data -------> | | | appl. | | relay | | | <--------- ok -- | | +-------+ +-------+ C: S: Schwartz, et. al. Expires April 23, 2002 [Page 5] Internet-Draft The APEX Publish-Subscribe Service October 2001 The service immediately responds with a reply operation containing the same transaction-identifier, e.g., +-------+ +-------+ | | <------- data -- | | | relay | | pubsub| | | -- ok ---------> | svc. | +-------+ +-------+ C: S: 2.2 Deleting an Existing Topic When an application wants to delete an existing topic, it sends a deletetopic operation to the service, e.g., +-------+ +-------+ | | -- data -------> | | | appl. | | relay | | | <--------- ok -- | | +-------+ +-------+ C: S: Schwartz, et. al. Expires April 23, 2002 [Page 6] Internet-Draft The APEX Publish-Subscribe Service October 2001 The service immediately responds with a reply operation containing the same transaction-identifier, e.g., +-------+ +-------+ | | <------- data -- | | | relay | | pubsub| | | -- ok ---------> | svc. | +-------+ +-------+ C: S: 2.3 Listing Existing Topics When an application wants to get a list of existing topics, it sends a listtopics operation to the service, e.g., +-------+ +-------+ | | -- data -------> | | | appl. | | relay | | | <--------- ok -- | | +-------+ +-------+ C: S: Schwartz, et. al. Expires April 23, 2002 [Page 7] Internet-Draft The APEX Publish-Subscribe Service October 2001 The service immediately responds with a topiclist operation containing the list of topics registered with its administrative domain, e.g., +-------+ +-------+ | | <------- data -- | | | relay | | pubsub| | | -- ok ---------> | svc. | +-------+ +-------+ C: S: In addition to the topiclist operation, applications can track changes to the topic list via the APEX presence service [7]. This approach is discussed is more detail later. Schwartz, et. al. Expires April 23, 2002 [Page 8] Internet-Draft The APEX Publish-Subscribe Service October 2001 2.4 Subscribing to a Topic When an application wants to subscribe to a topic it sends a subscribe operation to the service, e.g., +-------+ +-------+ | | -- data -------> | | | appl. | | relay | | | <--------- ok -- | | +-------+ +-------+ C: S: The service immediately responds with a reply operation containing the same transaction-identifier, e.g., +-------+ +-------+ | | <------- data -- | | | relay | | pubsub| | | -- ok ---------> | svc. | +-------+ +-------+ C: S: Schwartz, et. al. Expires April 23, 2002 [Page 9] Internet-Draft The APEX Publish-Subscribe Service October 2001 2.5 Cancelling a Subscription Either the subscriber or the service may cancel a subscription by sending a cancel operation., e.g., +-------+ +-------+ | | -- data -------> | | | appl. | | relay | | | <--------- ok -- | | +-------+ +-------+ C: S: +-------+ +-------+ | | <------- data -- | | | relay | | pubsub| | | -- ok ---------> | svc. | +-------+ +-------+ C: S: or +-------+ +-------+ | | <------- data -- | | | relay | | pubsub| | | -- ok ---------> | svc. | +-------+ +-------+ C: S: Schwartz, et. al. Expires April 23, 2002 [Page 10] Internet-Draft The APEX Publish-Subscribe Service October 2001 2.6 Distributing Subscription Management Servicing publish/subscribe activity from a single location would present scaling problems. To support distributed subscriber management, individual administrative domains can field pubsub servers that send subscribe and cancel requests to other pubsub servers. In this fashion, it is possible to construct a distributed tree of servers that handle publish and subscribe activity. Whether this set of servers is configured manually or through an automated tree formation protocol is outside the scope of the current document. When a pubsub server wants to act as a distributor for a particular topic it sends a subscribe operation to the service, using the appropriate subaddress as the originator, e.g., +-------+ +-------+ | pubsub| -- data -------> | | | svc. | | relay | | #2 | <--------- ok -- | | +-------+ +-------+ C: S: Schwartz, et. al. Expires April 23, 2002 [Page 11] Internet-Draft The APEX Publish-Subscribe Service October 2001 The service immediately responds with a reply operation containing the same transaction-identifier, e.g., +-------+ +-------+ | | <------- data -- | pubsub| | relay | | svc. | | | -- ok ---------> | #1 | +-------+ +-------+ C: S: Similarly, a pubsub server would send a cancel request using the appropriate subaddress as the originator. Additional processing steps are needed to handle the case where pubsub servers themselves may originate subscribe and cancel requests. Specifically, when any subscribe or cancel request is received, the receiving server must first check whether the originator falls within the administrative domain of a redistributing pubsub server for the given topic, and if so, the subscribe or cancel request is forwarded to that pubsub server. Section 4.5 and Section 4.6 present the algorithmic details. It is a local provisioning decision whether a redistributing pubsub server advertises its presence to end users. Schwartz, et. al. Expires April 23, 2002 [Page 12] Internet-Draft The APEX Publish-Subscribe Service October 2001 3. Publishing To publish a message to subscribers of a particular topic, an application sends an APEX data message to the service, using subaddressing to specify the topic for which group delivery is desired, e.g., +-------+ +-------+ | | -- data -------> | | | appl. | | relay | | | <--------- ok -- | | +-------+ +-------+ C: S: Schwartz, et. al. Expires April 23, 2002 [Page 13] Internet-Draft The APEX Publish-Subscribe Service October 2001 In response, the service forwards the message content to each subscriber of the subaddress-named topic, rewriting the message to use the dataHopping option (see Section 4 of [8] for details) and to contain a list of recipients so that the APEX core will relay the message to each subscriber in turn: +-------+ +-------+ | | <------- data -- | | | | | pubsub| | | -- ok ---------> | svc. | | | +-------+ +-------+ | | | | <------- data -- | | | sub 1 | | relay | | | -- ok ---------> | | +-------+ | | +-------+ | | | | <------- data -- | | | sub 2 | | | | | -- ok ---------> | | +-------+ +-------+ ... C: S: This subaddress-based topic naming is used rather than defining an explicit "publish" operation so that sending and receiving applications need not be aware that they are participating in group delivery transmissions. The placement of multiple subscribers within a pubsub message realizes the benefit of a single message being replicated N times by the APEX relay mesh, versus the transmission of N messages by the publisher (source) to the relay mesh. Schwartz, et. al. Expires April 23, 2002 [Page 14] Internet-Draft The APEX Publish-Subscribe Service October 2001 4. The Pubsub Service Section 5.1 contains the APEX service registration for the pubsub service: o Within an administrative domain, the service is addressed using the well-known endpoint of "apex=pubsub", or a subaddress of this well-known endpoint. Consult Section 2.2 of [2] for a discussion of APEX subaddresses. o Section 6.1 defines the syntax of the operations exchanged with the service. o A consumer of the service initiates communications by sending data containing the createtopic, deletetopic, subscribe, or cancel operation to the "apex=pubsub" well-known endpoint; or by sending any data to a subaddress of this well-known endpoint. o In addition to replying to these operations, the service may also initiate communications by sending data containing the cancel operation or by forwarding data previously sent to a subaddress of the "apex=pubsub" well-known endpoint. An implementation of the service must maintain information about in- progress operations in persistent storage. Consult Section 6.1.1 of [2] for a discussion on the properties of long-lived transaction-identifiers. Schwartz, et. al. Expires April 23, 2002 [Page 15] Internet-Draft The APEX Publish-Subscribe Service October 2001 4.1 Use of XML and MIME Section 4.1 of [2] describes how arbitrary MIME content is exchanged as a BEEP [3] payload. For example, to transmit: where "..." refers to: then the corresponding BEEP message might look like this: MSG 1 1 . 42 1234 Content-Type: multipart/related; boundary="boundary"; start="<1@example.com>"; type="application/beep+xml" --boundary Content-Type: application/beep+xml Content-ID: <1@example.com> --boundary Content-Type: application/beep+xml Content-ID: <2@example.com> --boundary-- END Schwartz, et. al. Expires April 23, 2002 [Page 16] Internet-Draft The APEX Publish-Subscribe Service October 2001 or this: MSG 1 1 . 42 1234 Content-Type: application/beep+xml END 4.2 The Createtopic Operation When an application wants to create a new topic to which subscribe operations and data transmissions can refer, it sends a "createtopic" element to the service. The "createtopic" element has a "topic" attribute, a "transID" attribute, and no content: o the "topic" attribute specifies the topic name for which this application wishes to allow future subscribe operations and data transmissions to be supported; and, o the "transID" attribute specifies the transaction-identifier associated with this operation. Schwartz, et. al. Expires April 23, 2002 [Page 17] Internet-Draft The APEX Publish-Subscribe Service October 2001 When the service receives a "createtopic" element, the service performs these steps: 1. If the access entry for the service matching the originator does not contain a "pubsub:createtopic" token, a "reply" element having code 537 is sent to the originator. 2. If the "topic" attribute specifies a topic name that already exists, a "reply" element having code 553 is sent to the originator. 3. Otherwise: 1. The service records the topic in its non-volatile state, to enable future subscribe operations and data transmissions refering to this new topic. 2. The service updates its presence information by adding a "tuple" element that corresponds to the new topic. The "destination" attribute of the "tuple" element identifies the subaddress used for the topic, and the "tupleInfo" attribute identifies arbitrary descriptive information about the topic (e.g., a textual description, a specification of the syntax of data messages transmitted for that topic, PICS [9] labels rating topic content, etc.) Consult Sections 2.1 and 4.4 of [7] for further details. 3. A "reply" element having code 250 is immediately sent to the originator. When sending the "reply" element, the "transID" attribute is identical to the value found in the "createtopic" element sent by the originator. 4.3 The Deletetopic Operation When an application wants to delete an existing topic (i.e., one for which a previous createtopic operation completed successfully), it sends a "deletetopic" element to the service. Schwartz, et. al. Expires April 23, 2002 [Page 18] Internet-Draft The APEX Publish-Subscribe Service October 2001 The "deletetopic" element has a "topic" attribute, a "transID" attribute, and no content: o the "topic" attribute specifies the topic name for which this application wishes to disable future subscribe operations and data transmissions; and, o the "transID" attribute specifies the transaction-identifier associated with this operation. When the service receives a "deletetopic" element, the service performs these steps: 1. If the access entry for the service matching the originator does not contain a "pubsub:deletetopic" token, a "reply" element having code 537 is sent to the originator. 2. If the "topic" attribute specifies a topic name that does not currently exist, a "reply" element having code 553 is sent to the originator. 3. Otherwise: 1. The service deletes the topic from its non-volatile state, to disable future subscribe operations and data transmissions refering to this topic. 2. The service updates its presence information by removing the "tuple" element that corresponds to the deleted topic. 3. A "reply" element having code 250 is immediately sent to the originator. When sending the "reply" element, the "transID" attribute is identical to the value found in the "deletetopic" element sent by the originator. Note that following a deletetopic operation, data transmissions refering to this topic may continue to be propagated. Although the service will all no new data transmissions to start refering to this topic, in-progress data transmissions may be in transit. 4.4 The Listtopics Operation When an application wants to get a list of existing topics, it sends a "listtopics" element to the service. The "listtopics" element has no content. Schwartz, et. al. Expires April 23, 2002 [Page 19] Internet-Draft The APEX Publish-Subscribe Service October 2001 When the service receives a "listtopics" element, the service performs these steps: 1. If the access entry for the service matching the originator does not contain a "pubsub:listtopics" token, a "reply" element having code 537 is sent to the originator. 2. Otherwise, a "topiclist" element is immediately sent to the originator, having the same "transID" attribute value", and containing a sequence of "topic" elements each with a single "name" attribute, enumerating the topics known in this administrative domain. 4.5 The Subscribe Operation When an application wants to receive forwarded messages sent to the service via the data transmissions sent to a particular topic (subaddress) at a domain, it sends a "subscribe" element to the service. The "subscribe" element has a "subscriber" attribute, a "topic" attribute, a "transID" attribute, a "duration" attribute, and no content: o the "subscriber" attribute specifies the endpoint to which data transmissions should be forwarded; o the "topic" attribute specifies the topic name for which this application wishes to have corresponding data transmissions forwarded; o the "duration" attribute specifies a non-zero maximum number of seconds for which the subscriber is interested in receiving forwarded data transmissions; and, o the "transID" attribute specifies the transaction-identifier associated with this operation. Schwartz, et. al. Expires April 23, 2002 [Page 20] Internet-Draft The APEX Publish-Subscribe Service October 2001 When the service receives a "subscribe" element, we refer to the "subscriber" attribute of the "subscribe" element as the "subject", and the service performs these steps: 1. If the access entry for the service matching the originator does not contain a "pubsub:subscribe" token, a "reply" element having code 537 is sent to the originator. 2. If the "topic" attribute specifies a topic name that does not exist, a "reply" element having code 553 is sent to the originator. 3. If the duration attribute is less than or equal to zero, a "reply" element having code 553 is sent to the originator. 4. If the topic already has a subscriber whose local-part is "apex=pubsub/TOPIC" (where "TOPIC" matches the value of the "topic" attribute), and whose domain-part matches the domain-part of the subject, then the service forwards the "subscribe" element to the existing subscriber. 5. Otherwise: 1. A "reply" element having code 250 is sent to the originator. 2. For up to the amount of time indicated by the "duration" attribute of the "subscribe" element, if a data transmission is sent to the service with a subaddress matching the specified topic, it is forwarded to the subject. (If the subject is already subscribed, the previous duration is no longer consulted.) Finally, when the amount of time indicated by the "duration" attribute expires, a cancel operation (Section 4.6) is sent to the originator. When sending the "reply" element, the "transID" attribute is identical to the value found in the "subscribe" element sent by the originator. 4.6 The Cancel Operation When an application no longer wishes to subscribe to a particular topic, it sends an "cancel" element to the service; similarly, when the service no longer considers an application to be subscribing, an "cancel" element is sent to the application. Schwartz, et. al. Expires April 23, 2002 [Page 21] Internet-Draft The APEX Publish-Subscribe Service October 2001 The "cancel" element has a "subscriber" attribute, a "topic" attribute, a "transID" attribute, and no content: o the "subscriber" attribute specifies the endpoint to which data transmissions should no longer be forwarded; o the "topic" attribute specifies the topic name for which this application wishes to cease having corresponding subscribed data transmissions forwarded; and, o the "transID" attribute specifies the transaction-identifier associated with this operation. When the service receives an "cancel" element, we refer to the "subscriber" attribute of the "subscribe" element as the "subject", and the service performs these steps: 1. If the access entry for the service matching the originator does not contain a "pubsub:cancel" token, a "reply" element having code 537 is sent to the originator. 2. If the "topic" attribute specifies a topic name that does not exist, a "reply" element having code 553 is sent to the originator. 3. If the topic already has a subscriber whose local-part is "apex=pubsub/TOPIC" (where "TOPIC" matches the value of the "topic" attribute), and whose domain-part matches the domain-part of the subject, then the service forwards the "cancel" element to the existing subscriber. 4. Otherwise: 1. A "reply" element having code 250 is sent to the originator. 2. The service removes the subject from the list of endpoints to which data is forwarded for the topic. When sending the "reply" element, the "transID" attribute is identical to the value found in the "subscribe" element sent by the originator. Note that following a cancel operation, the originator may receive further data transmissions directed to the specified topic. Although the service will forward no new data after processing a cancel operation and sending the reply operation, earlier transmissions may be in transit. Schwartz, et. al. Expires April 23, 2002 [Page 22] Internet-Draft The APEX Publish-Subscribe Service October 2001 4.7 Data Transmissions 4.7.1 Use of APEX Data Messages When an application wants to transmit information to other applications subscribed to a particular topic within an administrative domain, it sends data to the apex=pubsub service at the given administrative domain using the APEX "data" operation, with the subaddress set to the desired topic. When the service receives a data operation so addressed, it performs the following steps: 1. If the subaddress does not match an existing topic at this administrative domain, then when the APEX core delivers the data to the pubsub service (Step 5.3 of Section 4.4.4.1 of [2]), the pubsub service returns an "error" element having code 550. 2. Otherwise, the pubsub service returns an "ok" element, and then submits a new data element to the relay service, replacing the recipient with a set of recipients enumerating each endpoint that had previously successfully performed a "subscribe" operation specifying a topic name that matches the subaddress and for which the "subscribe" operation is still active (i.e., its specified duration has not been exceeded). 4.8 The Reply Operation While processing operations, the service may respond with a "reply" element. Consult Sections 10 and 6.1.2 of [2], respectively, for the definition and an exposition of the syntax of the reply element. Schwartz, et. al. Expires April 23, 2002 [Page 23] Internet-Draft The APEX Publish-Subscribe Service October 2001 5. Initial Registrations 5.1 Registration: The Pubsub Service Well-Known Endpoint: apex=pubsub Syntax of Messages Exchanged: c.f., Section 6.1 Sequence of Messages Exchanged: c.f., Section 4 Access Control Tokens: pubsub:createtopic, pubsub:deletetopic, pubsub:listtopics, pubsub:subscribe, pubsub:cancel, core:data Contact Information: c.f., the "Authors' Addresses" section of this memo Schwartz, et. al. Expires April 23, 2002 [Page 24] Internet-Draft The APEX Publish-Subscribe Service October 2001 6. DTDs 6.1 The Pubsub Service DTD %APEXCORE; Schwartz, et. al. Expires April 23, 2002 [Page 26] Internet-Draft The APEX Publish-Subscribe Service October 2001 7. Security Considerations Consult [2]'s Section 11 for a discussion of APEX security issues. The APEX access [5] service provides considerable flexibility to administrators. For example: To implement a policy that only allows applications within the example.com administrative domain to create and delete topics in that administrative domain, the APEX access service would contain the entry: To implement a policy that allows any application to subscribe to the music.jazz.milesdavis topic in the example.com administrative and that allows a pubsub server in the forwarder.com domain to handle distributed subscription management for this topic, the APEX access service would contain the entries: To implement a policy that allows anyone to publish to the music.jazz.milesdavis topic in the example.com administrative domain, the APEX access service would contain the entry: To add an exception list stating that mr.slate@example.com is not allowed to publish to this topic, the APEX access service would contain the above entry and also this entry: Schwartz, et. al. Expires April 23, 2002 [Page 27] Internet-Draft The APEX Publish-Subscribe Service October 2001 To implement a policy that only allows people who are subscribed to a topic to publish to that topic, the pubsub service would update the set of access entries whenever a subscribe or cancel operation was successfully performed. For example, when user barney@rubble.com subscribes to the music.jazz.milesdavis topic in the example.com administrative domain, the following token would be added to the APEX access service: Schwartz, et. al. Expires April 23, 2002 [Page 28] Internet-Draft The APEX Publish-Subscribe Service October 2001 References [1] Deering, S., "Host extensions for IP multicasting", STD 5, RFC 1112, August 1989. [2] Rose, M., Klyne, G. and D. Crocker, "The Application Exchange Core", draft-ietf-apex-core-05 (work in progress), August 2001. [3] Rose, M., "The Blocks Extensible Exchange Protocol Core", RFC 3080, March 2001. [4] Rose, M., "Mapping the BEEP Core onto TCP", RFC 3081, March 2001. [5] Rose, M., Klyne, G. and D. Crocker, "The APEX Access Service", draft-ietf-apex-access-07 (work in progress), August 2001. [6] Kantor, B. and P. Lapsley, "Network News Transfer Protocol", RFC 977, Feb 1986. [7] Rose, M., Klyne, G. and D. Crocker, "The APEX Presence Service", draft-ietf-apex-presence-05 (work in progress), July 2001. [8] Dixon, E., Franklin, H., Kint, J., Klyne, G., New, D., Pead, S., Rose, M. and M. Schwartz, "The APEX Option Party Pack, Part Deux!", draft-ietf-apex-party-04 (work in progress), October 2001. [9] World Wide Web Consortium, "Platform For Internet Content Selection (PICS)", W3C PICS, October 2001, . Authors' Addresses Michael F. Schwartz NetTopBox, Inc. EMail: schwartz@CodeOnTheRoad.com URI: http://www.CodeOnTheRoad.com Schwartz, et. al. Expires April 23, 2002 [Page 29] Internet-Draft The APEX Publish-Subscribe Service October 2001 Marshall T. Rose Dover Beach Consulting, Inc. POB 255268 Sacramento, CA 95865-5268 US Phone: +1 916 483 8878 EMail: mrose@dbc.mtview.ca.us K. Carlberg University College London EMail: K.Carlberg@cs.ucl.ac.uk Schwartz, et. al. Expires April 23, 2002 [Page 30] Internet-Draft The APEX Publish-Subscribe Service October 2001 Appendix A. IANA Considerations The IANA makes the registration specified in Section 5. Schwartz, et. al. Expires April 23, 2002 [Page 31] Internet-Draft The APEX Publish-Subscribe Service October 2001 Appendix B. Acknowledgements The authors gratefully acknowledge the contributions of: Jon Crowcroft, Eric Dixon, Huston Franklin, Carl Malamud, and Bob Wyman. Schwartz, et. al. Expires April 23, 2002 [Page 32] Internet-Draft The APEX Publish-Subscribe Service October 2001 Appendix C. Revision History Note to RFC editor: please remove this entire appendix, and the corresponding entries in the table of contents, prior to publication. C.1 Changes from draft-schwartz-apex-pubsub-01 o Moved the dataHopping option to the APEX party pack specification. C.2 Changes from draft-schwartz-apex-pubsub-00 o dropped references to expired MAPEX Internet Draft o modified createtopic and deletetopic operation descriptions (sections 4.2, 4.3) to include interactions with APEX presence service to track current topic list and to provide pointer to arbitrary descriptive content about topic (e.g., for PICS labels or a syntax description of the data messages sent for that topic) Schwartz, et. al. Expires April 23, 2002 [Page 33] Internet-Draft The APEX Publish-Subscribe Service October 2001 Full Copyright Statement Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2001). All Rights Reserved. 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This document and the information contained herein is provided on an "AS IS" basis and THE INTERNET SOCIETY AND THE INTERNET ENGINEERING TASK FORCE DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO ANY WARRANTY THAT THE USE OF THE INFORMATION HEREIN WILL NOT INFRINGE ANY RIGHTS OR ANY IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. Acknowledgement Funding for the RFC Editor function is currently provided by the Internet Society. Schwartz, et. al. Expires April 23, 2002 [Page 34]