On 3/29/2011 10:13 AM, Sam Hartman wrote:
At the mic at the technical plenary last night, I made a comment that I
strongly supported the IETF doing API work.
I've realized that people may have assumed I meant that it would be
appropriate for the IETF to specify an API and not a protocol for some
given task.
That's not what I meant, so I am writing to clarify.
I think that multiple levels of interoperability will be required for
building blocks used in platforms including the web platform.
"Multiple levels of interoperability" sounds interesting, and very possibly
quite important.
Can you elaborate on its meaning?
we're the IETF. We should definitely specify protocols for the building
blocks we create.
However, one problem that hurts interoperability is when platforms
provide different APIs or abstract interfaces to applications.
...
I think that we should move more into that business.
I see no problem with actually specifying a language-specific API when
the WG involved has the skills to do a good job.
Wow. What is the list of languages we should work on? C, C++, Javascript,
Java, Python, ...?
Which is not to deny the problem you cite: APIs differ and this hurts
interoperability.
One approach to solving it is, indeed, to specify /all/ of the APIs that map to
the protocol.
Another is to do more and better interoperability testing and let the API
developers see their deficiencies and fix them. The benefit of this is that it
moves the problem to the folks with the knowledge and incentives to work on it
and it takes this very expensive specification task out of the IETF's critical path.
d/
--
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net
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