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HTTP's Days Numbered
dlek writes: "ZDNet is running an article in which a Microsoft .Net engineer declares HTTP's days are numbered. (For those of you just tuning in, HTTP is the primary protocol for the world-wide web.) Among the tidbits in this manifesto is the inference that HTTP is problematic primarily because it's asymmetric--it's not peer-to-peer, therefore it's obsolete. Hey everybody, P2P was around long before Napster, and was rejected when client-server architecture was more appropriate!"
Anyone who has tried to understand the various "standards" for web services and their associated train wreck (I think I'm being gracious here) would realize that most of them are bolted on to a protocol that was never meant to serve them in such a way. HTTP is meant for quick requests, not monoloithic requests that take a long time.
Before you rush to say Mickeysoft is destroying the web, please realize that he's referring to web services, not your personal home page (although I'd imagine they'd like to make that proprietary too).
My Slashdot account is old enough to drink...
"HTTP's days as an RPC transport are numbered"
HTTP works great for a large number of purposes. It will continue to work great for a large number of purposes. However, it is not so great when you are trying to build powerful RPC mechanisms like SOAP on top of it. It's the latter where HTTP will slowly loose favor.
Your web browser will still be making HTTP requests for HTML documents many years into the future...
The problem is, most machines aren't even really *on* the internet anymore, just on the Web. Which is not as powerful, so you end up with these godawful kludges trying to run applications over HTTP.
The Right Thing would be to get IPv6 out, make local client firewalls and sandboxing standard, and ditch NAT and central firewalls.
Yeah, right.
Instead we have SOAP, a RPC-over-HTTP kludge. We may as well run PPP-over-HTTP and have done with it...
Oh yeah, and all operating systems besides Windows XP are obsolete.
ROFL.
By the way, the funniest quote in the article was:
Microsoft has some ideas (on how to break the independence on HTTP)
Now that was a Freudian slip... ;-)
299,792,458 m/s...not just a good idea, its the law!
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
HTTP does have it's problems, and it's one of the reasons that Jabber has it's own internal transport protocol to accomplish IM.
I've seen other proposals for HTTP replacements and have been less-than-pleased by their complexity and design. Based on what I've learned from Jabber, and great feedback from many in the open source and standards communities, XATP was born:
http://xatp.org/
XATP, the eXtensible Application Transport Protocol is very simplistic and geared to operate at a layer below content, identity, framing, and other application-level issues. Check it out and offer feedback or participate if your interested.
Jer
Didn't Cringely claim several months ago that they were going to try to do this? Well, not quite, but back in August he wrote:
So they decided to go up one level of abstraction. Hell why not, that way they break even more competing products.
Nope, no sig
while it's certainly true that http was never originally ENVISIONED as a protocol to serve shoutcast/icecast streams, for example, it's usefulness to that purpose is a tribute to how well the spec was thought out. the simple fact remains that it's an incredibly versatile protocol which can be (and is) used for nearly every data/media transport/request over the internet. microsoft is going to have to do something FAR more impressive to convince me they have a good reason to scuttle the most re-purposeable protocol on the internet.
ever wonder why 99% of ANY urls you see start with an http? ever wonder why flash webpages don't start with something like mmfttp and shoutcast streams don't start with plsttp?
wonder.
seem to remember that some time in the past MS claimed that the Internet was obsolete and the MicroSoft Network was the future. I think Unix is also obsolete according to MS.
And of course I am obsolete since I refuse to view MS products as anything else than toys. Admittedly by now toys that actually have some level of stability and can be used for some (limited) tasks without too much hassle. But as long as they insist on sitting on their island (admittedly a large one, but instable and plagued by document-rot), I will not consider their products "professional" in any sense.
Incidently the only argument in the article (aside from the "argument" that P2P is better than client-server, given as dogma) is that there are problems with transactions that have several minutes connection time. I am sorry, but I don't see how that makes http obsolete. First these long transaction are not that common and second they work fine. Or are we going towards an Internet where a telnet/ssh connection will be terminated after 3 minutes, because the backbone cannot cope?
Pure FUD, as far as I can tell.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted and ignored otherwise.
The problem with HTTP, as with any stateless protocol, is that there often are (or should be) relationships between requests. Ordering relationships are common, for example, as are authentication states. Stateless protocols are easier to implement, and thus should be preferred when such "implicit state" is not an issue, but in many other situations a protocol that knew something about state could be more efficient. All of this session-related cookie and URL-munging BS could just go away if the RPC-like parts of HTTP were changed to run on top of a generic session protocol.
Another error embodied in HTTP - and it's one of my pet peeves - is that it fails to separate heartbeat/liveness checking from the operational aspects of the protocol. Failure detection and recovery gets so much easier when any two communicating nodes track their connectedness using one protocol and every other protocol can adopt a simple approach of "just keep trying until we're notified [from the liveness protocol] that our peer has died". This is especially true when there are multiple top-level protocols each concerned with peer liveness, or when a request gets forwarded through multiple proxies. As before, having the RPC-like parts of HTTP run on top of a generic failure detection/recovery layer would give us a web that's much more robust and also (icing on the cake) easier to program for.
I don't know if any of this is what Don Box was getting at, but in very abstract terms he's right about HTTP being a lame protocol.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
1. As everyone knows, the WWW is the Internet.
2. Since the web runs using HTTP, http runs the Internet.
3. HTTP can't do everything the Internet can offer.
4. While there are other protocols out there (like ftp, p2p, telnet), only hackers and pirates use them, so they must be insecure.
5. Therefore, we must change http or the Internet is doomed.
The Internet is generally stupid
Try sending an email to MS customer support
-- It's better to be pissed off than pissed on.
MSTP .Net
.Net which will be used by the WWN (World Wide .Net) for anything from ms-mail (sending electronic messages to friends and family) to paying your ms-mortgage.
Microsoft will be anouncing Microsoft Transfer Protocol
I have a website. It's about Macs.
Mr. Box was not saything that HTTP is not good as a Hyper Text Transfer protocol, he was stating that it's being manipulated to perform RPC, which is true. The theme of the artical was on how HTTP is bad for RPC, which you seem to also agree with.
Simply because this guy now works at Microsoft does not mean he has an agenda for evil. As a matter of fact before working for Microsoft Mr. Box started a little company called DevelopMentor, He's also written a few books One of which is concedered "The" book on COM, Essential COM, ask any COM developer worth their salt if they own a copy, they do.
I've known of Mr. Box for years now and trully recpect him as a technical writter and developer and I honestly don't think that he would shill for Microsoft.
-Jon
this is my sig.
Yeah, I know with the Linux-hype over, some people feel very "objective" when they treat Microsoft's marketing schemes like the word of god.
However:
Will it become the standard on Windows? Sure, just like the Win32API - just like any api Microsoft pushes.
Will it harm or endange other operating systems? No. Worst case is that everything stays the same and Linux can't run Windows-programs. Best-case is that Mono allows Windows-compatibility which would benefit Linux greatly.
"But, he said, we can't stay on HTTP forever, despite all the investment and engineering that have gone into it. Among the problems with HTTP, said Box, is the fact that it is a [Not Owned By Microsoft] Remote Procedure Call (RPC) protocol; something that one [Non-MS] program (such as a [Netscape] browser) uses to request a [Potentially Unlicensed] service from another program located in another [NOT WINDOWS] computer (the server) in a network without having to understand [Proprietary] network details.
"We have to do something to make it (HTTP) less important," said Box. "If we rely on HTTP we will [Never Own The Internet Right Down To The Roots]. We at least have to raise the level of abstraction, so that we have an industry-wide [Monopoly] way to do long-running requests--I need a way to [Make Money Writing Books On How To Use Our Protocol].
HTTP is a protocol that was developed as a solution to a problem. That didn't mean we stopped using POP, FTP, Gopher, Telnet, KERMIT, etc., as they were developed to solve different problems. Now the new problem is Web Services, and the solution should not mean that we will stop using HTTP it to deliver web pages, or FTP to move files. We should not fear a new protocol (assuming it is good & worthy). As long as the solution has an IETF RFC number, with all the consultation and work required, it can be implemented by anyone. Remember HTTP wasn't invented by Microsoft, Netscape or even Linus. If you don't want Microsoft, AOL, Oracle or the MPAA developing the next solution, then come up with a great idea and start submitting RFCs.
HTTP is old and needs to be replaced, as soon as we can figure out what the best replacement is.
Er, why? Am I not being advertised to in the most efficient, flashy manner?
Fuck, the majority of what I use the web for could be handled by Gopher, let alone this fancy pants HTTP protocol.
--saint
I've never heard Don Box described as just a .Net engineer. That'd be like calling Richard W. Stevens just a "C programmer."
/. is with the Windows world.
Thanks for the laugh. It's always good to be reminded just how out of touch