> I see where you are coming from Brandon, and an XML protocol would be > nice if it was appropriate, but this is a stream based protocol, and XML > just isn't suited to that. This protocol requires that the client be > able to parse information as it comes from the node, so that it can > correctly handle failures etc, but XML can't really do this, since > without writing a rather weird XML parser (which would defeat the > purpose of using XML), you require an entire XML document before you can > convert it to a DOM or SAX representation.
First of all, in case there is any confusion on the matter, I'm not suggesting we implement an XML-based protocol. That would be very silly. I'm suggesting we use an already existing protocol, in particular I'm in favor of XML-RPC. XML-RPC handles the case which you speak of just fine. Absolutely peachy. Because it doesn't use XML documents, it uses XML fragments. So you can pass back one chunk at a time. Besides, there are two flavors of XML parsers, those that read the whole document and those that are stream-based and tell you about each tag as it comes. So you're confused about how XML parsers and XML-RPC work. I'd like to clarify at this point that I'm not arguing, just discussing in a friendly way. It seemed to me at the conference that everyone's gotten the impression that I'm fairly feisty, so I'd like to emphasize my general amicability on all subjects Freenet-related except for metadata, when I actually was being quite feisty, and that one time I yelled at Oskar, which was uncalled for. Right, so, sorry for the tangent. Anyway, I can see why people want a client protocol. The protocol itself will look simpler than the same messages being transmitted by XML-RPC. The code it will take to parse and emit it will be smaller than that for XML-RPC. But the amount of work for client writers will be greater until such point as all languages for which people want to write clients in have libraries for the parsing and emitting of FNCP. All languages which people want to write clients in already have XML-RPC libraries. But, you know, having a client protocol instead of making all the clients speak FNP makes me so happy that I don't really care all that much. _______________________________________________ Devl mailing list Devl at freenetproject.org http://www.uprizer.com/mailman/listinfo/devl
