Will BEEP Simplify Network Programming?

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?"

Comments

I used it once...

[Anonvmous Coward]

I used beep in a programming course in High School. Unfortunately, every time I used it people shouted "nosound!".

Agreed...BEEP is great work

[robla]

I've also been disappointed with the lack of uptake on BEEP. It's a very cool concept.

BEEP is Blocks Extensible Exchange Protocol (RFC 3080). More details can be found at here.

When we were designing RTSP, we looked for something like this, and at the time, the options weren't very appealing. We ended up using HTTP as a quasi-base protocol. I think it was the best solution at the time, but had BEEP been available, we'd have used it in a heartbeat.

That C Library doesn't actually use BEEP

[Kaz Riprock]

The guys who designed the RoadRunner C Library modified the protocol. They called it Minimal Extensible Exchange Protocol. They then implemented the protocol twice to speed up the system calls.

This way RoadRunner goes really fast with
MEEPMEEP!(thp-thp-thp-thpppp) this was all just a funny lie

Re:That C Library doesn't actually use BEEP

[red_dragon]

Given that we're discussing this within Slashdot and its context, I suggest that we rename it to Minimal Extensible Exchange Protocol Toolkit. Additionally, this protocol should perform every action within a single, long transaction encapsulating multiple exchanges, e.g.:

MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEPT!

My own application layer protocol

[Jeremi]

"Is everybody still inventing his own application layer protocol?"

By and large, yes... it's a symptom of the needs of applications being so varied.

(warning: blatant plug follows) For what it's worth, however, I've developed mine over the course of three years and a dozen or so projects, to the point where I think it's pretty mature and useful; it's open source, and portable to most environments, although the IETF has of course never heard of it... ;^)

well

[mindstrm]

Why do you assume we should have ONLY ONE application level protocol? There is a REASON that the Internet is based on IP, and not, say, TCP only. or UDP.
Or GRE.

Or anything else we have yet to invent.

Because we don't yet know the best way to use the network.

Maybe we haven't adopted BEEP because you don't just 'create' a standard by declaring your stuff is better. Maybe it's because peopel ALREADY know how to do regular socket programming.

Who knows.

Definitely not new, but...

[Nick Arnett]

BEEP came to life as BXXP at Invisible Worlds a few years back, where I was an executive. Our goal for a while was to use it to federate heterogenous search engines. Invisible is no more, but the protocol lives. A lot of thought by people with a great deal of Internet architecture went into it... but I'm not about to pass judgment on whether or not that's a good thing!

XML is too much sometimes

[Pauly]

I've played with BXXP/BEEP, and it is quite cool. Truly amazing P2P applications should be sprouting from its vines. However, the application that should be it's shining glory doesn't use it: Jabber. There must be someone out there in the jabber community that can expound on this.

Hanging my head in shame, I'm one of those "still inventing his own application layer protocols". ASN.1 and RPC were also supposed to save me from doing this. Lately, I've found I've been implementing my own protocols using the concept of netstrings to suit my admittedly low-level needs better. Sadly, as XML and its derivatives mushroom in complexity, I find them less appealing.

Re:XML is too much sometimes

[dmiller]

> the concept of netstrings [cr.yp.to]

Only Bernstein could think that an ASCII representation of Pascal strings is original.

Not so impressed

[Zeinfeld]

I was one of the authors of the HTTP protocol and did some work on HTTP-NG so I am broadly sympathetic to BEEP. However there are a number of reasons why it is not having a huge impact, some political, some technical.

BEEP's main proponent, Marshall Rose was one of the main wheels in the OSI project. So much of the initial buzz came from his name alone. People were talking about the protocol before they read the drafts (oh yes that is normal for the IETF).

I do have a bunch of quibbles technically. First using XML is a good idea, Using the obsolete SGML DTD mechanism to describe the protocol sucks. I think Marshall started to suplement the DTD with schema fragments but that makes things worse, not better, we now have two specs in one document, the schema version which is what people will implement and the DTD version which is normative.

The other problem is that SGML is a real baaad choice for an encoding at that level. The main complaint about http is that the encoding is too verbose leading protocol exchanges to require multiple round packets instead of one. BEEP does not address that problem.

Politically BEEP has bigger problems, first being that IETF does not have as much influence as it might appear when it comes to promoting new protocols. There haven't been very many IETF protocols that started in IETF process and took off like wildfire in the past ten years. HTTP took off and was brought into IETF process, same with TLS (SSL). Most successful IETF protocols had a userbase before the working group was formed.

The problem with BEEP is that Marshall did not start with a constituency who had a problem that BEEP was the solution for. Instead he wrote the protocol and then went off looking for consumers. So we start to see Marshall popping up at random in working groups like SACRED peddling the BEEP Kool-Aid. The problem being that if you are doing a researchy protocol like SACRED the last thing you should be doing is layering it on someone else's research.

After this happened a few times Marshall started to alienate folk like myself who might be interested in BEEP as an option but certainly were not going to allow him to insert himself onto our critical path.

The other problem is the nature of the IETF these days. The problem is that they talk a good talk about being open and such, but it is really an old-boys club. The old-fart faction is strong on the IESG and IAB, they have known each other for 20 years and they don't want anyone messing with their turf.

In theory the IETF process is open. In practice there are a bunch of shadowy cliques who make the real decisions in private. BEEP got to RFC status in record time because it was proposed by an IETF insider. Problem is that the IESG does not have much influence with the people in the Web Services world which is where all the interest in XML based protocols is at the moment.

Most of the people I see at W3C and OASIS Web Services meetings have no IETF experience at all. Of those who do, none are IETF insiders and so an endorsement by the IESG does not have much force.

For BEEP to take off it really needs an endorsement by one of the heavy hitters of the Web Services world which basically means IBM. Microsoft or Sun. I don't think that is very likely because everyone knows that there is a lot of work to be done to make Web Services work and there is simply nothing to be gained by putting BEEP on the critical path. People are more interested nailing down WS-Security, SAML, XKMS, geting WSDL to work and such.

Re:Not so impressed

[mrose]

first, i'll apologize for running beepcore.org on a small server
combined with tomcat. (if someone has some hints on making
netbsd/apache/tomcat run more robustly in the face of significant load
-- or if you can tell me how to get the thing to fail gracefully instead
of tossing its stack -- please drop me a private email -
mrose+mtr.slashdot@dbc.mtview.ca.us - thanks!).

second, i have to praise this post for the way it seemlessly blends a
little bit of truth, a little bit of wisdom, along with a healthy amount
of ignorance and untruth. (my favorite untruth: marshall as the OSI
guy. the actual truth: marshall killed OSI in the IETF on November 4th,
1993 with the "roadkill in motion" speech.)

it is easy to agree with the fact that beep suffers from both political
and technical hurdles. as usual though, folks can disgree on the actual
details.

on the technical front: the beep specs use DTD not schema -- there
aren't any schema fragments in either rfc3080 or rfc3081, you must be
thinking of something else. the choice of DTD over schema is simple:
DTDs are ugly, but schema sucks. that explains why everyone has their
own pet language for defining the acceptable syntax of an XML
document. if schema was a winner, we'd be seeing fewer alternatives
instead of more.

everyone has their own "main complaint" about http. i hadn't heard the
verbose encoding one before, but maybe we should ask Keith Moore to add
it to the list (cf., rfc3205).

certainly, there's a lot we can agree on with respect to the political
front, so i'll just focus on the part we don't agree on.

the actual consumer for beep is the ietf. there used to be this joke
that the apps area invented cloning, because all working groups formed
argued exactly the same issues, over and over and over again, regardless
of the problem to be solved.

with beep, no one gets to argue those things any more (e.g., how to
frame packets), instead they get to go off and presumably argue things
specific to their application domain. (if folks want to understand the
reasoning behind this, check out rfc3117.)

the sacred working group, that you're so pissed off about me cutting
into, is a perfect example. a bunch of guys focused on security issues,
trying to write an application protocol. sorry, wrong skill set.

contrary to popular belief, i don't need to go looking for trouble. in
this case, it was a couple of ADs leaving an early sacred meeting,
shaking their heads, and then asking me to beat some sense into some
folks.

if you're unhappy that i stuck my nose in your business, then all
i can suggest is you get more clueful in the application design space,
so "the management" doesn't feel they have to go out and get you
help. particularly help that you don't like, and especially help that
would rather be doing other things with other people.

beep isn't research. it's a "best hits" collection of stuff dating back
to 1981 that's known to actually work. the only new part of beep is that
it got integrated into one coherent spec. and that's the reason that the
iesg approved it after only a year. they were familar with what it did,
how it worked, and they had a problem.

of course, you are perfectly free to attribute this to an "old boys
network" (i'm sure allison would appreciate that). when i find the
actual "right wing conspiracy", i'll be sure to sign up. it will
certainly reduce my frustration in dealing with the 100's of procedural
hurdles that get thrown in my way at the ietf.

finally, as far as web services go, well, let's just say that those guys
could learn a lot from what xerox did back in the early 80's. in a few
years, they may actually have something that works half as well as what
xerox did... /mtr

Re:Not so impressed

[Twylite]

I'm sorry, but I can't buy much of this at all.

BEEP is a ridiculous waste of time which equates to XML-encoded-TCP over TCP/IP. The many unsubtle problems that causes should be obvious; if they aren't, here are some:

• Multiple channels to a single endpoint: typically not useful without routing; few protocols require multiple data bands, and those that do usually require QOS in at least one band, in which case you want separate TCP/IP connections where QOS will (hopefully) be supported by routers between you and the server.
• XML protocol headers: Adds a massive amount of bandwidth and processing overhead, which achieve little if any benefit over a binary encoding. Contrary to popular bullshit, XML is not human readable (as if computers care about that), is not fast/efficient and is not programmatically simple to decode (2 grammars, 2 character encodings, 5 syntactically different data classes, and 2 orthogonal data models all in once specification with more BNF rules than C++!). The XML spec. states explicitly "Terseness is of minimal importance..." - certainly NOT what you want to use as header data on packets in a communication channel.
• Security: BEEP proides just another mechanism for hiding attacks, and requires a new application level firewall which must feature a full XML parser (in order to monitor and firewall individual channels within the protocol). Not only that ... you think that Unicode attacks are bad? With several years of development behind them, MS XML parser and Xerces STILL aren't fully XML 1.0 compilant -- how many security compromises do you think may be present with all the encodings XML supports, and how many will be present in the hundreds of less mature products?

You point out that SGML is a bad thing for encoding "at that level", but in the same breath say that XML is a good thing. Since XML is SGML-compatible, and largely employs the same syntax (but doesn't allow SGML short-cuts like leaving out closing tags), I fail to follow your argument.

And in your musings about the IETF, has it ever struck you that maybe the IETF also think that adding an incomprehensibly slow transport layer on top of an existing and widely supported transport layer is a shit idea? BEEP is NOT an application level protocol, even if it wants to claim to be one.

Re:Not so impressed

[zoydoid]

sorry, but BEEP only specifies XML for use on the control channel, that is setting up and tearing down the initial connection and any new channels. an ad hoc parser is sufficient for this purpose. any application layered over BEEP is free to use whatever data format it wants.

Re:Not so impressed

[Zeinfeld]

second, i have to praise this post for the way it seemlessly blends a little bit of truth, a little bit of wisdom, along with a healthy amount of ignorance and untruth. (my favorite untruth: marshall as the OSI guy. the actual truth: marshall killed OSI in the IETF on November 4th, 1993 with the "roadkill in motion" speech.)

Ah so you are claiming that the Marshall Rose who wrote The Open Book : A Practical Perspective on Osi is a different Marshall T. Rose. No sorry, Marshall you made a major technical contribution to OSI, or at least he claimed to have done so on the jacket cover of the copy I read. You did not 'kill it' at the IETF, OSI was killed in the marketplace long before 1993. The speech had the impact it did precisely because you knew the OSI stack.

on the technical front: the beep specs use DTD not schema -- there aren't any schema fragments in either rfc3080 or rfc3081

Well Duuuhhh read what I wrote. I checked the RFC just before posting and saw that. Schema may be 'ugly' as you put it, but none of the major XML programming platforms are based on DTDs, they are all based on schema. And BEEP is dead at Microsoft, Sun and IBM without schema, cold stone Deeeeeeaaaaadddd.

with beep, no one gets to argue those things any more (e.g., how to frame packets), instead they get to go off and presumably argue things specific to their application domain. (if folks want to understand the reasoning behind this, check out rfc3117.)

No, we have a five minute argument on whether to use BEEP or not, reject it and carry on.

the sacred working group, that you're so pissed off about me cutting into, is a perfect example. a bunch of guys focused on security issues, trying to write an application protocol. sorry, wrong skill set.

I wrote a fair bit of HTTP, I don't think that you have the right to go arround saying who is and who is not competent to write application protocols. If you want to get into a reputaion war you are going to loose this one. I think that BEEP is very naive when it comes to the problems that arose when it came to layering application protocols on it. I suspect that like LDAP and X500, by the time BEEP has been extended enough to be useful it will look like HTTP.

if you're unhappy that i stuck my nose in your business, then all i can suggest is you get more clueful in the application design space, so "the management" doesn't feel they have to go out and get you help. particularly help that you don't like, and especially help that would rather be doing other things with other people

I only attended the one SACRED meeting and your comment on 'the management' is quite illustrative of the George W. Bush style crony-standards process the IETF is becomming notorious for.

finally, as far as web services go, well, let's just say that those guys could learn a lot from what xerox did back in the early 80's. in a few years, they may actually have something that works half as well as what xerox did... /mtr

Standard old fart response 'we did it all twenty years ago sonny', 'and we did it better'. Yeah and you should have seen the anti-gravity machines we made twenty years ago.

I don't much care for the arrogance of the IETF 'management' as you call them. I certainly don't appreciate folk who think that they have the right to make the type of off-hand blanket pronouncements on other people's work that you and they make habittually without backing it up. Your Xerox comment is absolutely typical of IETF old fartism, you want to have the right to be dismissive, you don't have the technical arguments on your side. So instead of detailing a real technical issue you allude to an earlier system, the more obscure the better. The message: 'I am too important to have to justify my comments but I believe that you are not competent to work on this problem'.

Your comment on Web services only illustrates that you really don't understand what is going on, what people are trying to achieve or why previous efforts such as CORBA failled. I am not going to explain why or how Web Services are different because I am faaaar toooo important. I may not be old enough to have achieve old fart status but I can certainly play the part on the net.

Still you are right on one battle, if the IETF is to regain some relevance at the upper end of the protocol stack adopting XML as the way to author RFCs is the only way forward. However the IETF is going to have to do a lot more than produce its documents in a format that does not look like utter crap from a teletype before I am going to take any standards there. I want a genuinely open and geuinely transparent process. I want standards groups to complete in 18 months, not 10 years - and yes it is possible, the SAML group I was a member of developed the basic specs which have been adopted as the basis for liberty in 18 months.

Re:Not so impressed

[Zeinfeld]

Hmmmm...."Zeinfeld". Pardon me for asking, but which HTTP author [ietf.org] are you?

I am not one of the Editors, I am listed as a principal contributor before the group members.

I've met most of you, and like all of you, but quite frankly, at least one of you has a conflict of interest when it comes to opining on BEEP.

Not so in my case, I was not big into HTTP-NG, I was not involved in DIME or Multiplex. I am not HFN which should be bloody obvious if you know him. However I am a friend and my company does a lot of work with his (Microsoft), but I also do a lot of work with Sun.

As for the IETF being an old boys/girls club...well, yeah. Welcome to politics. I think the IETF has generally been a reasonably equitable old boys club.

It is reasonably equitable until you actualy try to get things done. Look at DNSSEC, they have been trying to deploy the thing for ten years. In the meantime the .com zone has grown so large that the scaling bug in the design of the NXT record means that the protocol is not going to be deployed by the registrar for those zones without modification. A fix has been proposed for two years and has been agreed on the list. But the fix is currently blocked by secret discussions between the 'DNS Directorate' which is a closed and entirely unaccountable group. The not so obvious strategy being to delay OPT-IN until the DS flag day has gone through and then reject OPT-IN as requiring a flag day. Just about the only reason that strategy makes sense is if the IESG wants to delay DNSSEC for at least a year and risk a lawsuit.

On IPSEC the group is currently facing two problems that have been known for five years. First IPSEC was deliberately designed to make it impossible to use through NAT devices. I remember the comments in the WG at the time, people took it as a badge of honor to sabotage NAT - pretty lame when one of the major reasons NAT is needed is a design blunder by the IETF itself when it choose the IP address space to be smaller than the human population of the world - and on reliable authority this was done to allow an address to fit into a single register.

The other problem with IPSEC is that they ignored the problem of PKI and so we now have a wildly successful deployment of IPSEC for VPNs, a function which it is particularly ill suited for, and almost no extra-net or genuine internet deployment.

At any rate, I encourage people to do some digging themselves on this. I can't say that my experience is overly deep in this area, and I certainly haven't tried to design a protocol on top of BEEP, but based on what I know, BEEP looks like a pretty good idea.

I haven't tried to implement a protocol on top of BEEP either, and I am even less likely to do so given Marshall's outburst earlier in the thread.

My point about old boys network is that I have no confidence that BEEP is ready for prime time. I will not be confident until someone actually does build a protocol on top and demonstrates the bugs have been ironed out. HTTP looked pretty straightforward until people tried to use it.

The IETF is in severe danger of becomming irrelevant, as attendence at recent meetings is deonstrating. The much bigger problem with the IETF is that they really don't feel any responsibility to anyone but themselves. They take their role as supreme Internet standards body for granted.

The average IETFer has pretty much a slashdot mentality. They have plenty of contempt for technology have nots while curiously tollerating computing environments from the stone age. MIME is an IETF standard but send an attachment to an IETF mailing list and the old-fart faction complain that their antiquated mailer can't handle it. Send HTML mail and they will have appoplexy. (And if you think HTML is a bad idea I presume you read Slashdot in the no-graphics, plaintext mode).

The average IETFer does not think that they have an obligation to the community of Internet users or the vendors that support them. So holding up a protocol for a year while an AD who does not have a clue about security 'gets comfortable' with a security modification advocated by the Security ADs, well that is not a problem. Designing a protocol that breaks through NAT, well that is not a problem, and so on.

I am certainly not antithetical to the aims of the IETF. However there is a reason why I helped take the Web standards out of the IETF and set up W3C, there is also a reason why I am currently helping take standards from W3C to OASIS. There is a free market in standards bodies and the IETF is in dire need of a severe kick up the pants.

Re:XATP, web services + pipelining

[ebyrob]

to erase the TCP connection negotiation overhead.

Isn't this why UDP and other protocols exist on top of IP (or other routing layers). So you can forgo the overhead that a fancy session layer (like TCP) incurs.

It seems to me that most of these new protocols are just trying to get a free ride through existing firewalls... Why can't we all just use IP the way it was meant to be used? (and move to v6 to alleviate addressing pinches)

Re:stateful connection

[mindstrm]

No state is maintained from one ftp connection to the next.
No state is maintained from one telephone call to the next.
No state is maintained from one quake session to the next.

By that definition, all protocols are stateless.

Re:to clarify

[delta407]

Technically, you are completely and flat-out wrong to argue that UDP is anything but connectionless. TCP, a connection-oriented protocol, does handshaking with the remote computer (specifically, a SYN, SYN+ACK, ACK) before anything can take place; it forms a connection. UDP, on the other hand, allows you to just blast data back and forth, reducing latency since you don't need to send three packets before sending any data. UDP does not establish a connection to the remote host, it simply allows for data exchange.

UDP is great for DNS since queries are small and the overhead of using TCP is large compared to the data exchanged. UDP is also great for things like cache servers using ICP, since then you only need one socket descriptor that can serve however many sibling/child caches you have.

From RFC 768, entitled "User Datagram Protocol":

This protocol provides a procedure for application programs to send messages to other programs with a minimum of protocol mechanism. The
protocol is transaction oriented, and delivery and duplicate protection are not guaranteed. Applications requiring ordered reliable delivery of streams of data should use the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP).

The RFC is two pages long (as opposed to RFC 793 -- TCP -- which has 84 pages) and explains that it is simply a packet of data that does nothing but carry data. It does no handshaking in the protocol, and does not establish a connection, and is thus connectionless.

The BEEP community is strong and gettng stronger

[jrimmer]

BEEP's an impressive protocol framework with even more impressive implementations.

I'm using it in a burgeoning open source project because of it's ability to multiplex bidirectional communication channels in a transparent fashion. Other features such as dynamic client/server roles, authentication, and channel encryption are just icing on the cake. The less I have to muck around with protocol state details the better!

When I first started looking at BEEP I was impressed by the spec but I was suspicious as to the quality and breadth of implementations. After looking through the high level Java abstractions and more specifically BeepCore-Java I was able to throw together a workable protocol that's proven to be extensible and quite robust in just a few days.

The BEEP community is alive and well!

There are a number of opensource BEEP implementations:

• BEEPCore-Java - Java implementation with a BSD-like license
• BEEPCore-C - C/C++ implementation with a BSD-like license
• PermaBEEP - C implementation with a SleepCat-like license
• BEEP4j with an Apache-like license
• PyBeep for Python with an unknown, but OSI approved, license
• RoadRunner - C and Python implementation with an OSI approved license.
• Beepcore-Ruby - Ruby implementation (though just beginning) with a BSD-like license

There's an excellent IRC channel at OpenProjects with the kitschy name #beepnik.

There's the obligatory O'Reilly book, BEEP: The Definitive Guide.

But the best source for information is the Beepcore.org site which has, among other things, an excellent whitepaper on the justification and design of the BEEP protocol.

Annoyed

[KidSock]

Well thanks. Now I'm ticked. The ./ post made this sound very interesting taking about framing and low level down to the metal "network programming". So I followed the links. I get 5 minutes into the spec and what do I find? It's another telnet based protocol that is largely XML. I'm going to puke if I see another stupid XML networking protocol. I can't believe I'm the only one who sees how stupid it is to format all network traffic in a verbose text format like XML. Here's 448 byte "hello" example.


C: MSG 0 1 . 52 158
C: Content-Type: application/beep+xml
C:
C: <start number='1'>
C: <profile uri='http://iana.org/beep/TLS'>
C: <![CDATA[<ready />]]>
C: </profile>
C: </start>
C: END
S: RPY 0 1 . 110 121
S: Content-Type: application/beep+xml
S:
S: <profile uri='http://iana.org/beep/TLS'>
S: <![CDATA[<proceed />]]>
S: </profile>
S: END

Re:Annoyed

[anshil]

I'm completly sharing your visions.

XML maybe very cool and ideal to store data, for config files and all that. How cool would be a completly XML based /etc directory?

However I don't see any real benefits for protocols.

In example what does XML-RPC do any good? Is conventional RPC suddendly uncool? What can XML-RPC do, what normal RPC can't? Except that it uses 5 times more bandwith.

It's just sad, if you type RPC in google, the first five links you get is all about XML-RPC. So marketing words can boost a whole technology? Nobody seems to remember what RPC itself is, and a lot of developers mismatch it today if you talk with them about RPC, you say hey why don't we use RPC? Instead of stuffing sockets ourself, and they start to talk about XML, RPC does not need XML at all.

Re:Annoyed

[ceswiedler]

The best use of XML is when you DON'T have control over one of the ends. B2B applications can benefit greatly from DTDs/schemas and aren't going to care about bandwidth issues as much.

The "classic" example for an XML based protocol is a server which provides weather information to anonymous clients over the public net. Do you want to write your own protocol and try to explain it to everyone who wants your information? No, just package it in XML, provide a schema, and it's easy for clients to fetch.

Situations where you DO have control over both ends don't benefit from XML very much, especially when performance is important (and when isn't it?).

There is a place for technologies which consume extra CPU, memory, and bandwidth but provide something else: for example, reduced programmer development time (for some applications). Java is a good example. The benefits of XML are more limited, but they do exist.

Re:The BEEP community is strong and gettng stronge

[binkley]

I wrote a BEEP implementation for Perl when I was working at Enron Broadband Services, but my group was never able to get the lawyers to let give it GPL licensing and release it publically.

At the time, it seemed like our choices for letting partners have some say in network routing through our backbone were SOAP or BEEP, and we favored BEEP because of partner pressure from Sun against all things favored by Microsoft (go figure). Eventually, we used simple XML messages rather than an entire application layer.

Early on, BEEP wasn't a difficult protocol to implement; however as time passed, it grew more and more complex, until it maintaining BEEP in a closed-source environment outweighed any benefits. At that point we switched to simple XML messages.

BEEP isn't a bad protocol at all. It is a little over-designed: as a fan of eXtreme Programming, I'd have preferred that smaller versions of the protocol get wider use and more feedback before being expanded.