I'm experimenting with BIP70/71 (payment protocol) usage in face to face payments (more on that soon).
I've excountered an issue with the protobuf format. Protobufs are not self-delimiting. That means if you're reading from an undelimited stream, you will read endlessly because you don't know how much to read. The current BIP70 implementations probably work because they're reading either from a file or from an HTTP resource which sets the Content-Length header. Trouble is the Content-Length header is optional, and also there are many kinds of streams that don't have this built-in delimiting mechanism. The Java protobuf API solves this by offering delimited I/O, like payment.writeDelimitedTo(os); This writes the size of the message as a varint before writing the data. I don't know about protobuf implementations for other languages but I'd expect them to offer something compatible. However, this leading varint is an incompatible change and would need to be added to the spec. I specifically encountered this with PaymentMessage and PaymentACK, but it might be a good idea to apply this to all messages if any. Open for discussion. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ CenturyLink Cloud: The Leader in Enterprise Cloud Services. Learn Why More Businesses Are Choosing CenturyLink Cloud For Critical Workloads, Development Environments & Everything In Between. Get a Quote or Start a Free Trial Today. http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=119420431&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
