in reply to Multiplexing Stuff

Seems like you have two things going on -- the want for binary xml support and the need to write an app that can multiplex connections over a single port. Seems like it's mostly coming up with a protocol that allows different session id's in it's packets, or maybe I'm missing something? Anyhow, help me understand ... it sounds like this is going somewhere interesting but I'm not getting the problem clearly defined yet.

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Re^2: Multiplexing Stuff
by Eyck (Priest) on Oct 12, 2004 at 13:50 UTC
    Well, I've got the exact same feeling, like I'm going somewhere interesting, but I'm not there yet.

    I feel like there's some generic solution waiting outthere, I kind of met some of the problems that such solution would solve... but I'm having problems touching the solution or clearly defining the class of problems that it would target..

      What is the architecture here? Peer-to-peer, client-server?

      packets floating in a TCP/IP stream with a field in the binary format for "substream ID" or something like that would be doable.

      That's all multiplexiing really is ... packets inside of some encapsulating format.

      Pack/unpack is a PITA ... if someone has a good Perl-data-structure to binary implementation, I'd like to hear of it too, something like YAML (or even the dreaded XML) would be language agnostic, but you don't want to send that over the wire if you care about efficiency. Heck, you really don't want to parse it either. If it's Perl <-> Perl maybe Storable is okay, you could freeze a packet class or something?

        Actually this is done quite often but we typically don't see it or think of it as multiplexing.. proxy servers being an overly simple example. VPN, etc.

        Using perl for this should be fine unless it is time critical.

        Jason L. Froebe

        No one has seen what you have seen, and until that happens, we're all going to think that you're nuts. - Jack O'Neil, Stargate SG-1