Re: Representative sample of industry protocols

Hi Dave,

On 26 October 2016 at 09:47, Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org> wrote:

> I am hearing strong agreement about the value of HTTP as a very popular
> Internet protocol, but not so much about the impact of different
> application domain requirements on the communication patterns.
>

I'd argue the existing collection of IoT protocols you listed are probably
best suited for meeting those application domain specific requirements.


> HTTP itself can be used in many different ways, and this can lead to
> interoperability challenges. It thus makes sense to identify design
> patterns for common sets of requirements based upon an agreed set of use
> cases. We can then define the metadata vocabulary for declaring how a
> particular platform is using the protocol, as a means to enable
> interoperability. The Interest Group has already done quite a bit of work
> on this, albeit on a restricted set of use cases.
>

I agree. As I understand it this is what the "Web Thing Model" is about too.


> Whilst we can prioritize work on HTTP, we shouldn’t preclude work on other
> protocols, as according to the level of interest amongst the group
> participants. The Interest Group, for instance, has worked on CoAP.
>

I do understand the appeal of a mini-HTTP over UDP for certain use cases,
although I think if HTTP/2 gets high adoption it will make CoAP less
appealing. I just don't think it's feasible to extrapolate those principles
to every existing IoT protocol.


>
> In respect to WebSockets, people tend to roll their own (proprietary)
> protocol using JSON messages. Interoperability would require work on
> standards for these messages. This seems like something that needs further
> incubation to ensure the appropriate level of critical review.
>

Here I also agree. WebSockets is quite a low level protocol and it isn't
immediately obvious how to create a standard API over this protocol.
Definitely something that requires further incubation as is being discussed
in the other thread.


> p.s. this is of course just my personal opinion.
>

My emails represent the opinion of everyone at Mozilla.

Only joking ;)

Ben