Re: Suggestions for custom application-layer protocol?

From: David Schwartz (davids_at_webmaster.com)
Date: 05/25/05 

Date: Wed, 25 May 2005 13:07:30 -0700

"Mark" <mark_2811nospam@excite.com> wrote in message
news:0N4le.10977$on1.1525@clgrps13...

> Thanks for all the excellent suggestions so far. I'll read through the
> RFCs
> for various Internet application protocols. I've also found some good
> information in Eric S. Raymond's online book "Art of Unix Programming".
> It
> would be nice to be able to use a simple standard protocol of some kind.
> It
> seems strange to have to come up with ways of formatting text fields,
> delimiting messages etc since I'm sure this has been done already many
> times
> before.

    You can take a page from the URL encoding scheme and use a list of
<param_name>=<value> pairs delimited by & signs. Encode all less than signs,
greater than signs, & signs, = signs, percent signs, whitespace, control
characters, and non-ascii characters as '%xy' where x and y are the first
and second hexadecimal digit of the ASCII value.

    So a query might be:

query=get&parameter=uptime<newline>

    And a reply might be:

query=get&parameter=uptime&value=1%20hour,%205%20minutes<newline>

    Specify that each end ignore any parameters they don't understand
(rather than considering it an error), and your protocol is extensible.

    DS

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