Cisco To Open-Source New Messaging Protocol

Esther Schindler writes "Do you use SOAP, CORBA or EJBs? You might want to take a look at Etch, writes James Turner for CIO.com. It's language-, platform- and transport-agnostic, and Cisco is planning to release it as open source. Certainly, it offers some technical benefits: 'In addition to a simplified configuration, Etch also promises less overhead over the wire, compared to SOAP. In a testbed environment where SOAP was managing around 900 calls a second, Etch generated more than 50,000 messages in a one-way mode, and 15,000 transactions with a full round-trip, company officials stated.' And the open source part? Cisco is in the process of deciding what license to use. 'The intent is to use a less restrictive license than GPL, perhaps Apache or Mozilla. This is to allow commercial developers to incorporate Etch into products without licensing issues. A final announcement on the licensing decision will be available in the next month.'"

Comments

Microsoft's Kerberos

[NZheretic]

A purely public domain release of the specs will just lead to a repeat of the history of Kerberos. See Kerberos, PACs And Microsoft's Dirty Tricks, along with almost every other protocol that Microsoft chooses to "extend" in an inoperable manner and lock out via both trade secret and incompatible patent licensing schemes.

Re:Microsoft's Kerberos

[Froqen]

A test suite wouldn't have helped. Win2k worked just fine with normal kerberos as a client and as a server. The problem was that if you wanted to deal with domain based groups you needed an extension, something that MSFT wasn't intrested in letting people have for free.

Re:This is an improvement?

[AlXtreme]

Most people just don't RTFA, but you skipped a percentage of the words in the summary too !
"In a testbed environment where SOAP was managing around 900 calls a second, Etch generated more than 50,000 messages in a one-way mode, and 15,000 transactions with a full round-trip"

Flaming the GP isn't correct in this case, the summary is ambiguous. There is a difference between managing calls and generating messages, as a single call can generate multiple messages.

A correct summary would have been to compare the amount of calls a second both SOAP and Etch can handle, or the amount of messages/transactions required for a fixed number of calls. But I think the PR-drone that wrote up the article did so knowingly to put SOAP in a bad light.

Or are you simply being sarcastic? If so: WOOOOOSH!