Post Sockets at IETF 103
10 November 2018
/ post-sockets
The Post Sockets cabal was at IETF 103 in Bangkok in November 2018.
We gave an update on some recent changes to the Transport Services
Architecture to the
TAPS working group, and met separately to discuss the next steps
towards completing the work.
We submitted the -02 versions of the
architecture,
API, and
implementation
drafts just prior to the IETF meeting.
The architecture draft was updated to better explain the event-driven
and message-oriented nature of the transport services framework, and
its intent to support flexible implementation. The API draft now has
an expanded and reorganised discussion of transport properties, updates
around name resolution, expanded discussion of connection groups, an
InitiateWithIdempotentSend() action along with some discussion
about managing connections, and includes more discussion around connection
state and ordering of operations and events. Updates to the implementation
draft were minor, fixing only some editorial issues.
During the TAPS working group meeting, Michael Welzl reviewed
some open issues with the drafts. He led a discussion of connection
and message properties and cached state, to try to reach closure on some
ongoing discussions. This was productive, especially around understanding
what transport properties should be listed as experimental in the draft
and what should be incorporated into the main text. We will shortly
submit updated versions of the drafts reflecting this discussion.
In the follow-on side meeting, we discussed our plans for completing
the architecture draft, for revising the implementation draft now that
the terminology is stabilising, and for resolving the open issues with
the API. We expect that the architecture will be stabilised this year,
since it seems relatively stable and the problem is well understood.
The API specification should be complete by the IETF 104 meeting in
Prague in March 2019, and the implementation guidelines by the end of
2019. This latter depends on implementation progress, to ensure we can
give good guidance. While Apple's implementation exists, and is widely
used, further implementation experience in different programming
languages, and on different operating systems, would be useful.