On Mon Nov 5 15:11:33 2007, Thomas Charron wrote:
On 11/5/07, Michal 'vorner' Vaner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Hello
> On Mon, Nov 05, 2007 at 02:45:05PM +0000, Dave Cridland wrote:
> > Another option would be to setup a distinct connection (and
protocol) for
> > routing blobs, and so send them through the server, yet not
in-band. I'm
> > not comfortable with this, because it means essentially
duplicating all
> > security information, and maintaining synchronization between
two distinct
> > streams.
> Or make the connection blobs by default, and some blobs could
contain
> complete XML documents, like this:
> lenght of first block
> <message to='bla'....>
> length of second block
> <iq ...>
> length of third block
> some binary data.
> It is as much drastic approach as the blobs, it changes the
protocol
> from the very basic ground. Furthermore, you can extract the
stanza and
> feed it to any XML parser.
Not to mention the documentation would be much easier. We could
just refer to the BEEP standards instead of having to write our own.
Of course, one could argue, just use BEEP at that point.
Way ahead of you. See the first paragraph of the mail quoted above.
:-)
The essential principle is much the same, but I'm not advocating
bringing the whole of BEEP into play, here. That has flow-control and
all sorts, and supports the splitting of a message into multiple
frames, which brings in a lot of complexity.
This complexity is unwarranted, in my opinion, in the context of
XMPP. The one thing we might want - and I stress might - is the
framing of arbitrary data by framing everything.
We've always relied, in XMPP, on the implicit framing that XML can
give us, but that's not always the best option, as we've seen. Base64
doesn't - in my opinion - grant us sufficient efficiency in a number
of circumstances.
So we need something else, and our two options boil down to either
framing everything - the BEEP method - or an escape mechanism which
is used to frame non-XML data - we can call this the IMAP method,
since it's pretty similar.
I strongly suspect, given the way the discussion is going, that we
either have to consider framing everything - and that's a huge break
from XMPP - or else we need an escape mechanism that works. Or, of
course, we decide to give up and frame using XML as now, and use
base64 to cope.
Dave.
--
Dave Cridland - mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] - xmpp:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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