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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.'"
Someone please add the tag 'suddenoutbreakofcommonsense' to cover the licensing decision.
Invenio via vel creo
Glad to see more and more companies moving away from GPL, understanding that it will only limit the potential adoption. As a highly respected registered member of the Slashdot community, I'm posting as AC as this post will very likely be modded troll.
SOAP could be easily integrated over current HTML based networks without need to make hole in firewall. But it was pig slow and designing stateful services was painful.
CORBA offered more technical challenges viz, complexity, version control, fault tolerance (not that a SOAP HA services is piece of cake, but I don't want anybody to go through torture of designing a HA CORBA server)
hilarious
It'll be interesting to compare Etch to ICE, which is a GPL'd open-source, cross-language RPC toolkit (you can buy commerical licenses too). It's quite widely used by banks and is generally reckoned to be speedy.
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How does one "open source" a protocol? There's no source to open, just a specification.
*reads article*
Ah, it's actually a set of libraries that use a new protocol.
All of these distributed technologies have been shit. CORBA was absolutely hell to develop with. Besides the runtime performance problems, development was always a huge hassle. It rarely just worked. J
Java's RMI was slightly better. But again, the development overhead was huge. Generating proxy and stub classes becomes a chore really quickly, and debugging becomes a real challenge.
SOAP was a little bit better than CORBA and Java RMI. At least writing the object layer code is a far more reasonable task. The performance, though, was complete shit compared to Java RMI and Corba. Whatever development time you saved initially in writing the SOAP interfacing code was instead spent trying to optimize what you had so that it wouldn't perform so fucking horribly.
In some ways, I hope that Cisco can do better. But I really don't know if that's possible. It may just be the nature of the beast that these sort of technologies perform poorly, are slow to develop, and are often nothing more than a huge hassle.
The LGPL is the only license that will insure that at least that Cisco's implementation of the protocol can not be easily extended in an inoperative manner.
Given the timespan that Cisco expects the protocol to be in use, version 3 of the LGPL is the best option.
Other than license, how does this compare to ZeroCs Iceï¼Y Does anybody know? I've played with Ice before and it's very well done, although I remain to be convinced of the value of remote object references in a distributed system.
More and more companies moving away from GPL? That's a strange conclusion, considering that it's probably had the fastest growing mindshare an uptake of any software license, ever, and that GPLv3 is proving very popular already with new projects and migrations.
There's absolutely no ethical reason to choose a less restrictive license over the GPL. The only thing the GPL restricts is the ability to restrict others. THAT is possibly a reason to avoid it, since, for example, I would like to prevent military types from using things I worked on, but avoiding the GPL because you want corporations to have the ability to use public works it in works they then keep from the public is a VERY strange notion.
So? That's called 'Freedom'. I'd rather have too much of it than too little.
"Here's the spec, do whatever you want with it, but you can only use our name for it if you pass this huge test suite."
Might be, but you are totally off-topic here. This article is about doing this ober network, which has nothing to do with Instant Messaging, save for the fact that some information transfer is involved. IIRC, there are things like XEP-0072, that allow for application data messaging over XMPP, but these are also not exactly of interest to most Jabber users, and if they require server extensions, well, you'll be out of luck with using "popular services" }the public ones?] to transfer such data.
Ezekiel 23:20
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.
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!
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