Subject: FYI

From: Leslie Daigle <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2000 16:22:20 -0500

I came across some other work being done to work on a different
problem, that also uses XML as the transport-independent basis
for query/response protocol:  "Information Content Exchange (ICE)",
for access to syndicated content.  See

        http://www.webtechniques.com/archives/1999/11/greening/

Anything we'd care to borrow/learn from the experience?

What struck me as similar:

"ICE is one of the most innovative uses of XML,
 in part because ICE is mainly a protocol with a
 little bit of data, while most XML standards
 focus solely on data. ICE doesn't even specify
 the format of the syndicated content data. In
 XML terms, it's just bytes inside an ice-item
 entity. The character data inside an ice-item
 can be structured using one of the
 industry-specific XML data representations --
 BizTalk, RosettaNet, CommerceOne, WDDX,
 and so on.

 [...]

 ICE provides only minimal security and
 access-control facilities. Typically the HTTP
 transport layer handles security, using such
 technology as SSL. Access control is handled on
 the syndication server, which performs
 authentication through the usual Web server
 password-access system, and provides different
 subscription offers to different subscribers.

 Request-Response

 The ICE protocol defines a set of
 request-response pairs coded in XML. The ICE
 standard doesn't specify the underlying transfer
 protocol, but does suggest an implementation
 using the HTTP POST/response mechanism
 called "ICE/HTTP". The body of the HTTP
 POST contains the ice-request, and its
 associated HTTP response contains the ICE
 response. As far as I know, all current ICE
 implementations use ICE/HTTP. This article
 assumes ICE/HTTP is the transport.

 Every ice-request is contained within an
 ice-payload, which identifies the ICE version
 and the sender, and provides a request-id.
 [Listing One] shows a sample request payload.
 Most of the header is devoted to debugging
 information.

 Upon receiving a request, the respondent
 creates a response payload, which contains
 whatever the subscriber asked for, if available.
 The response payload contains many of the
 same header tags as the request payload."

Leslie.

--

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"My body obeys Aristotelian laws of physics."
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Leslie Daigle
[email-masked]
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