Designing Network Protocols

Post by pquerna » Thu, Feb 23, 2012, 7:56 AM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #9

jacques_chester wrote: post #2

I think the short version is: in the past 5 years, simple wire-oriented serialisation formats have become much more common. At the time you had your pick of ASN (humongous) or Thrift (brand new).

Not particularly fair. You also had XDR (ubiquitous on Unix systems), IIOP, TLV, ICE... not to mention what ever protocol designer for the past 20 years has used: network byte order integers and ASCII/UTF8 strings. Some people just like ASCII, human readable protocols. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's a little silly to suggest that the options for a packed binary encoding in 2007 were limited because Thrift…

Post by tptacek » Thu, Feb 23, 2012, 6:06 PM UTC

pquerna wrote: post #21

tptacek wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not particularly fair. You also had XDR (ubiquitous on Unix systems), IIOP, TLV, ICE... not to mention what ever protocol designer for the past 20 years has used: network byte order integers and ASCII/UTF8 strings. Some people just like ASCII, human readable protocols. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's a little silly to suggest that the options for a packed binary encoding in 2007 were limited because Thrift…

I mentioned ASN.1 DER, but I honestly didn't think I should go into a history of XDR or other encodings. I guess I can't skip any history in a blog post....