Re: Draft Minutes of HTTP Working Group, 33rd IETF Meeting, Stockholm

Excerpts from ext.ietf-http: 31-Jul-95 Draft Minutes of HTTP Worki.. Jim
Gettys@w3.org (4887*)

> Who has implemented a non-blocking (streaming) RPC system that can
> be used if we are to avoid rolling our own?

I've sent mail to Jim on this separately, but I wanted to point out that
ILU, which is freely available in source form for both commercial and
non-commercial use, includes an implementation of a non-blocking RPC
system.  ILU provides support for both synchronous (blocking) or
asynchronous (non-blocking) calls.  Since ILU is protocol-independent,
many different on-the-wire protocols can be used with it.  Two different
on-the-wire protocol implementations are provided with the ILU sources,
the ONC RPC wire protocol and the XNS Courier wire protocol.  It would
be easy to implement another wire protocol for ILU embodying HTTP, but
it seems more useful to use a more efficient binary protocol.  All wire
protocols used with ILU share the semantics and infrastructure provided
by ILU, including its careful management of resources such as file
descriptors, connections and buffers.  User-level code is never aware of
the specific wire protocol being used.

More ILU info is at ftp://ftp.parc.xerox.com/pub/ilu/ilu.html.

Bill

Received on Tuesday, 8 August 1995 13:56:40 UTC