Subject: 47th IETF: BLOCKS BOF

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 01 Mar 2000 17:34:40 -0500

An Application Protocol Framework and A Model Application BOF (blocks)

Tuesday, March 28 at 1545-1700
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CHAIRS: Marshall Rose <[email-masked]> 
        Carl Malamud <[email-masked]>  

DESCRIPTION:

Historically, each Internet application protocol has defined its own set of
rules for exchanging control and data information. Although there are a lot
of similarities (e.g., dot-stuffing in SMTP and POP, octet counts in HTTP
and IMAP, 3-digit reply codes in FTP and SMTP), there isn't a lot of reuse
of design. As a result, designers of new application protocols usually have
to make the same set of design decisions - over and over again - to deal
with the same set of trade-offs, but usually without the benefit of large
amount of institutional history.

The BOF introduces a generic application protocol framework (called BXXP)
for connection-oriented, asynchronous, request-response interactions over
TCP. This particular subset of the problem supports a large class of
Internet applications, whilst providing solutions to common design issues 
for those applications, including: framing, segmentation, structuring, and
multiplexing of messages, along with an authentication and privacy over the
transport.

A framework requires a real-world proof of concept. Blocks is an
architecture for managing metadata and defines an exchange model for
organizing information into navigation spaces. The Blocks system is the 
model application for BXXP. The BOF introduces the issues of metadata 
management and describes how the Blocks architecture addresses those issues. 
As proof of completeness, the current Blocks implementation has over 25TB 
of data and metadata spinning.

AGENDA:

- Overview of problems in application protocol design
- Discussion of BXXP philosophy
- Presentation of BXXP framework
- Description of metadata management
- Questions and, perhaps, Answers

Helpful reading:
    - draft-mrose-blocks-protocol-00
    - draft-mrose-blocks-architecture-00
    - draft-mrose-blocks-exchange-00
    - draft-mrose-blocks-service-00