An Application Protocol Framework and A Model Application BOF (blocks) Tuesday, March 28 at 1300-1515 =============================== CHAIRS: Marshall Rose Carl Malamud DESCRIPTION: Historically, each Internet application protocol has defined its own set of rules for exchanging control and data information. Although there are a lot of similarities (e.g., dot-stuffing in SMTP and POP, octet counts in HTTP and IMAP, 3-digit reply codes in FTP and SMTP), there isn't a lot of reuse of design. As a result, designers of new application protocols usually have to make the same set of design decisions - over and over again - to deal with the same set of trade-offs, but usually without the benefit of large amount of institutional history. The BOF introduces a generic application protocol framework (called BXXP) for connection-oriented, asynchronous, request-response interactions over TCP. This particular subset of the problem supports a large class of Internet applications, whilst providing solutions to common design issues for those applications, including: framing, segmentation, structuring, and multiplexing of messages, along with an authentication and privacy over the transport. A framework requires a real-world proof of concept. Blocks is an architecture for managing metadata and defines an exchange model for organizing information into navigation spaces. The Blocks system is the model application for BXXP. The BOF introduces the issues of metadata management and describes how the Blocks architecture addresses those issues. As proof of completeness, the current Blocks implementation has over 25TB of data and metadata spinning. AGENDA: - Overview of problems in application protocol design - Discussion of BXXP philosophy - Presentation of BXXP framework - Description of metadata management - Questions and, perhaps, Answers Helpful reading: - draft-mrose-blocks-appldesign-00 - draft-mrose-blocks-protocol-01 - draft-mrose-blocks-architecture-01 - draft-mrose-blocks-exchange-01 - draft-mrose-blocks-service-01