Thursday, 02/20/03

I burned up much of today, not on necessary jobhunting or software, but on the rapacious consumption of BEEP: the Definitive Guide. I started it more or less on a lark, never having exhibited even a passing interest in protocol design, and was startled to find myself engaged in the best read from O'Reilly since Jon Udell's groupware book.

BEEP is a toolkit for building application protocols on top of TCP. The main idea is in RFC 3080, and the standards-track implementations are housed at beepcore.org. The book is tiny, barely 200 pages including the index, so I was most of the way through it before I even thought to doublecheck that the code runs on Mac OS X.

Oh, the horror. There's a Java version further along than C, but the C effort is where I was pinning my hopes, and it seems to have been derailed by a rival implementation with a less friendly license than beepcore's BSD terms. It's a sad day. BEEP would have been a blast, but it's appealing specifically because I'm not interested in becoming the sort of programmer who likes to spend time tinkering at or below the protocol layer. Back to SOAP and HTTP. 11:31PM «

Bits pushed by Movable Type