On Wed, Mar 22, 2006 at 01:38:24PM -0700, David Boreham wrote: > > >- - Simple doesn't necessary mean less code, text-based rather > > than 'binary' protocols, etc. The fact that you can debug your > > protocol by looking at tcpdump traces should not influence > > your design too much. > > > > > Of course LDAP is a purely binary protocol, and some of us have made a nice > living debugging the encoding/decoding code for it ;) > > An available text-based variant (DSMLv2) has approximately zero > deployment footprint. > > OTOH the text based protocol argument worked well in the case of > SOAP/XML-RPC.
When I look just at specs, never mind actual protocol traces, I find that wading through a bunch of XML is almost as hard as looking at XDR encoded data (I've had fun debugging ONC/RPC protocols). Now, BER/DER are definitely less fun still, but thinking of XDR as a 4-octet aligned subset of PER I would go out on a limb and say that looking at traces of PER-encoded data wouldn't be so bad. (And then you have to encrypt the traffic...) But then, with extensible protocol decoders, such as ethereal, does this matter anymore? I'll go out on a limb and say "no." When implementing a new protocol one should also implement dissectors for traces of it too, just as one should implement test suites for new software. Oh, let's not have the encoding argument again. We have enough standard and ad-hoc encodings already, and I bet there will always be someone left who is not satisfied with existing choices. Nico -- _______________________________________________ dix mailing list [email protected] https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/dix
