Cisco To Open-Source New Messaging Protocol

Esther Schindler writes "Do you use SOAP, CORBA or EJBs? You might want to take a look at Etch, writes James Turner for CIO.com. It's language-, platform- and transport-agnostic, and Cisco is planning to release it as open source. Certainly, it offers some technical benefits: 'In addition to a simplified configuration, Etch also promises less overhead over the wire, compared to SOAP. In a testbed environment where SOAP was managing around 900 calls a second, Etch generated more than 50,000 messages in a one-way mode, and 15,000 transactions with a full round-trip, company officials stated.' And the open source part? Cisco is in the process of deciding what license to use. 'The intent is to use a less restrictive license than GPL, perhaps Apache or Mozilla. This is to allow commercial developers to incorporate Etch into products without licensing issues. A final announcement on the licensing decision will be available in the next month.'"

Microsoft's Kerberos

[NZheretic]

A purely public domain release of the specs will just lead to a repeat of the history of Kerberos. See Kerberos, PACs And Microsoft's Dirty Tricks [slashdot.org], along with almost every other protocol that Microsoft chooses to "extend" in an inoperable manner and lock out via both trade secret and incompatible patent licensing schemes.

Re:Microsoft's Kerberos

[Froqen]

A test suite wouldn't have helped. Win2k worked just fine with normal kerberos as a client and as a server [microsoft.com]. The problem was that if you wanted to deal with domain based groups you needed an extension, something that MSFT wasn't intrested in letting people have for free.

Re:This is an improvement?

[AlXtreme]

Most people just don't RTFA, but you skipped a percentage of the words in the summary too !
"In a testbed environment where SOAP was managing around 900 calls a second, Etch generated more than 50,000 messages in a one-way mode, and 15,000 transactions with a full round-trip"

Flaming the GP isn't correct in this case, the summary is ambiguous. There is a difference between managing calls and generating messages, as a single call can generate multiple messages.

A correct summary would have been to compare the amount of calls a second both SOAP and Etch can handle, or the amount of messages/transactions required for a fixed number of calls. But I think the PR-drone that wrote up the article did so knowingly to put SOAP in a bad light.

Or are you simply being sarcastic? If so: WOOOOOSH!