Will BEEP Simplify Network Programming?

Posted by Cliff on Monday July 15, 2002 @12:30PM from the it's-a-standard-why-not-use-it dept.

hensley writes "There is a (not quite) new effort by the IETF to standardize a framework for network applications, called BEEP, the Blocks Extensible Exchange Protocol. Standardized in RFC3080, it takes care of all lower level tasks an application level protocol has to like framing, authentication and capabilities negotiation in a modular and lightweight way. In the current issue of Internet Packet Journal (a quite nice and free-as-in-beer technical publication by Cisco) is a well written Introduction to this framework. Why isn't anyone adopting this protocol besides some Java libraries like beep4j and PermaBEEP and a C library called RoadRunner. I couldn't find any applications based on this protocol, regardless of it's promised capabilities. Is everybody still inventing his own application layer protocol?"

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Why? by KingAdrock · 2002-07-15 12:42 · Score: 0, Redundant

It strikes me that being the first to implement a protocol is risky. What if nobody else implements it. What if it is trashed all together? What if it is shown that it isn't all that great after all?

Get a few big companies to use it and watch the rest follow.