On Mon Aug 27 20:55:05 2007, Jonathan Chayce Dickinson wrote:
I was perusing over a couple of MSDN articles, when I came across DIME (Direct Internet Message Encapsulation). Jeez, I thought, that would fix all the file issues in Jabber (like SI). So I wrote a draft, any takers? What do you all think? Didn't want to push this forward until I got some feedback.
DIME seems to have been orphaned by its authors, in favour of soap12-mtom, so I'm not convinced it'd be a good plan to go this route whatever the merits of the general concept.
However, as a general note, encapsulating small amounts of "binary" data in base64 is generally okay - you'll recover the majority of the 33% bloat through compression (which you hopefully have via TLS, and may have via other means).
This isn't suitable for large amounts of data, though, since compression doesn't fully recover the overhead.
Moreover, compression algorithms will become "poisoned" through trying to compress different types of data - typically via skewing the Huffman encoder and destroying the backreference "dictionary". This is especially true if the data being transferred is already compressed, in this case you can observe surprisingly high increases in data transfer cost (ie, negative compression).
But sending bulk data through XMPP is a bad idea for a number of other reasons, not least of which it's trashing the server, and clogging your XMPP channel (thus reducing its response time).
A better method is to negotiate a peer-to-peer session suited to the kind of transfer you're doing, although I admit that's not exactly a ground-breaking suggestion. :-)
Dave. -- Dave Cridland - mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] - xmpp:[EMAIL PROTECTED] - acap://acap.dave.cridland.net/byowner/user/dwd/bookmarks/ - http://dave.cridland.net/ Infotrope Polymer - ACAP, IMAP, ESMTP, and Lemonade
