On Sun, 2003-02-16 at 10:03, Martin Stecher wrote:
3.
I like to minimize the message overhead (see my performance
considerations in point 5). Together with what I said above in the first
section, I think that a message header and footer (if a footer is
necessary at all) should be as short as possible. Usually, protocols
write a protocol version into each request and response - but why?
IMO, because it reduces the state to be held by the endpoints of the
connection.
Isn't
it enough to do this once when a callout connection is established.? All
the messages within a persistent connection will be of the same version.
When we try to keep this in mind, every message could be designed to be
a minimum around the payload.
Messages should also follow a same general syntax to make parsing as
simple and fast as possible and to allow to skip easily message types
that are optional.
Agreed. IMO this has a greater impact on performance than a few bytes
for version identification.
The thing to remember is that any general purpose protocol will be
slower than a specially tuned protocol. We're building a general purpose
tool here - so reliability, ease of implementation and interoperability
are (IMO) greater priorities.
Rob