Coding method for group communication protocol

I am involved in two EU-funded research projects,
SeniorOnline (http://cmc.dsv.su.se/sol) and SELECT
(http://cmc.dsv.su.se/select) which both are planning to
develop distributed protocols which might in the future be
candidates for standardisation. We have a problem in
choosing a coding method for the distributed operations we
are planning to specify. Example of operations might be in
SeniorOnline:

- Subscribe to a forum in another server
- Replicate a message to another server
- List the members of a forum in another server

Coding method which we are considering are:

- XML (sent via HTTP). Advantage: Powerful, general-purpose,
  a current fad.
- multipart/formdata (RFC 2388, RFC 1867). Advantage:
  MIME-based, easy to produce test data since an ordinary
  HTML form can be used.
- A variant of the DSN format (RFC 1894)
- CORBA
- A variant of LDAP, since some of the operations
  we will define will be directory-type operations

In the first three cases, HTTP would probably be used for
transport. I do not know enough about CORBA, but it may
have its own transport protocol.

Can I get advice on which of the above protocol encoding
methods would be best for us to use?


------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jacob Palme <jpalme@dsv.su.se> (Stockholm University and KTH)
for more info see URL: http://www.dsv.su.se/~jpalme

Received on Friday, 29 January 1999 05:00:12 UTC