Hi Rodrigo, I can tell about LDAP codec support, as I was involved in the ASN.1 codec we are using in Apache Directory Server.
So far, there is nothing existing to generate codec in MINA. We have started a lab called Dungeon (http://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/labs/dungeon), but due to lack of time, we haven't gone very far. Considering you have an ASN.1 compiler which generate codecs, then using the codec is pretty straigth forward in MINA. The current LDAP ASN.1 codec is based on a state machine, and is totally statefull (so that you can stop the decoding in the middle of a stream, and start again 10 minutes later, as soon as the container associated with the structure being decoded is kept in memory). I can see the interest of having a generic ASN.1 compiler coupled with MINA to provide an efficient stack. MINA itself is pretty versatile, but yiu have to be sure that the codec is threadsafe, this is the only point. I nerver heard about BinaryNotes, I don't know if it generates good codecs (both in term of reliability, security and performance -, but I see that its license is LGPL, and I think it's not compatible with ASL 2.0 license so far (at least, it means that ASF can't distribute code under LGPL license, but nothing forbid you to distribute ASL 2.0 code withing LGPL licensed code. IANAL though, so you'd better check this point ;) Last, not least, I _think_ that writing a BER/CER/DER codec generator is quite an easy task, compared to a PER codec. And even a BER/CER/DER codec is not really that simple, if you want to avoid problems like OutOfMemory exceptions, buffer overflows, and deliver good performances... My 2cts, hope it helps ! -- Regards, Cordialement, Emmanuel Lécharny www.iktek.com
