Software Engineering & Unprotocols
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Licenses for Protocols
A few years back, when we set-up the Digital Standards Organization, one of our goals was to create a simpler framework for protocol development. At the time, licensing a protocol spec as open source was unheard of, and offensive to many people. Today it's just radical. In this article, I'll look at why and how to license a protocol spec.

date.png17 Apr 2013 13:51 | comments.png 0 Comments | tags.png unprotocols
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Burning Down the House: AMQP revisited
When the Wikipedia page for a contentious topic shows no real argument, you know someone with time and money has something to hide. And AMQP is certainly contentious. In my experience, and because I'm observant, rather than sensitive, the AMQP/1.0 authors are simple bullies who believe might makes right. But one learns to fight back against bullies, because, karma. I'm going to coin a nickname for AMQP/1.0, which is the "Burning Down The House" release.

date.png22 Oct 2012 11:25 | comments.png 2 Comments | tags.png amqp unprotocols
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NOM-1 grammar and notes
Time to get formal. Even the simplest contracts have to be robust against our charming but ineradicable stupidity. Perhaps the simplest formal language for an unprotocol is ABNF. So here is a first draft grammar for NOM-1, with notes. This page will morph into a real unprotocol draft spec.

date.png15 Jun 2011 13:57 | comments.png 0 Comments | tags.png unprotocols
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First steps to NOM-1
NOM-1 is a lightweight messaging unprotocol for #zeromq over UDP. The name stands for "NOM-oriented messaging". There's a good reason for the cuteness. If I gave it a confidence-inspiring name like "Message-oriented Datagram Protocol", people might use it without further thought. The silly name will make life and public acceptance hard for NOM-1. So it's going to have work really hard to succeed.

date.png14 Jun 2011 12:35 | comments.png 0 Comments | tags.png unprotocols
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Cheap and Nasty, two essential patterns
Unprotocol enlightenment comes one step at a time. While it can be tempting to try to use generic solutions, it's often wiser to divide problems into classes, each with an optimal solution. Let's look at Cheap and Nasty, two essential patterns for unprotocol design.

date.png06 Jun 2011 19:14 | comments.png 0 Comments | tags.png unprotocols
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Majordomo and Titanic in PHP
The Majordomo Protocol and Titanic Service Procotol are two neat little unprotocols built on top of ØMQ. Ian Barber (@ianbarber) has just made PHP implementations of these.

date.png05 May 2011 15:26 | comments.png 0 Comments | tags.png unprotocols
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Using a RESTful Transport Layer
Couple of us are developing a new mobile concept, which I'll write about later somewhere else. The little thing talks to a web service, and for this we're using RestTL, an unprotocol that "specifies standard rules for representing resources, and standard mechanisms for working with them in a RESTful fashion over a plain HTTP client-server network."

date.png02 May 2011 10:13 | comments.png 0 Comments | tags.png unprotocols
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Finally, the ØMQ wire level protocol!
ZMTP/1.0 defines the wire level protocol used by ØMQ (versions 2.x) over TCP. It has a framing layer, a connection layer, and a content layer. It's a neat little unprotocol that is free to remix, lightweight, and easy to understand.

date.png30 Apr 2011 15:59 | comments.png 0 Comments | tags.png unprotocols
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Keywords for Unprotocols
Up to now, software protocols have been designed with levels of formality that tend to exclude facile participation from the fat belly of developers. tl;dr: protocols in suits bore the pants off most of us. We propose the concept of the "unprotocol", which is a lightweight spec that's easy to read, fast to implement, and obvious to get right.

date.png30 Apr 2011 15:50 | comments.png 0 Comments | tags.png unprotocols
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Elegant Little Pieces
Unprotocols are elegant little pieces that we remix to create order and sanity in the swirling chaos that is the software industry. There are, IMO, three essential properties of an unprotocol. One, it's immune from capture. Two, it's lightweight. Three, it uses natural semantics. Said @leastfixedpoint: It's a mystery to me why AMQP isn't yet specified in little elegant pieces like this: http://rfc.zeromq.org/spec:13.

date.png30 Apr 2011 15:30 | comments.png 0 Comments | tags.png unprotocols
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