Apps Messaging - Semantics of a Message

[John Taylor]

On 10 Apr 2007, at 19:48, Alasdair Allan wrote:

>
> You knew I was lurking... ;)
>
>> In fact, why not define a standard for transport, say, e.g., XML, so
>> that the transfer between app and messaging implementation can be
>> further abstracted?  Say then, if my implementation listens on a TCP
>> socket, it can accept the XML from anyone.
>
> I wouldn't be adverse to encoding the message content in XML. So  
> long as we keep the XML trivially simple, something we could hack  
> together on the back of an envelope is probably as far as we want  
> to go, that's fine.

I see the message encoding as being something tied to the transport  
mechanism: if we go with XML-RPC then we'll use their encoding  
(though we'd still have to supply a few extra details), if we go with  
http-get, then we might specify JSON to do the encoding, while if we  
decided that plain TCP was the way to go then we'd have the fun of  
defining as wacky an encoding as we like.  I don't think we need to  
tie this down just yet, but whatever encodings we choose our  
constraint is that they must be "freely convertible".


> We're not looking for grandiose visions with multiple schema and  
> includes and other fancy stuff at this point.
>

Oh lordy, I hope not.

John