Friday, August 02, 2002, 12:55:24 AM, you wrote: TJH> Attached is the first Internet Draft of the Unified RFC Protocol. IETF 54 TJH> is long over and the mailing lists need something else to talk about...so TJH> here is something to discuss. General purpose of your draft is quite clear for me. Many protocols can be presented as remote procedure call (RPC) and can be unified. But historically all protocols are different. Alteration of STD or BCP protocols or something settled long time ago (FTP, SMTP, POP3, HTTP etc.) is not possible at all, since it will demand of alteration of all software, (servers and operational systems). But unification of new protocols is good task if purpose of those protocols is exactly RPC. Necessity of such RPC standard frequently feels applied software developers. They use either RPC protocols from large corporations (as SOAP or DCOM) or develop something non-standard. Corporate standards frequently are not open. Certainly, it would be great to see unified standard of RPC in the near future. Probably, it is preferably to create new working group in IETF to develop such protocol. SOAP is based on XML (markup language) and does not approach for those purposes. It can be usable only to interaction between Web application through HTTP, but nowise to be RPC standard. However, main idea of SOAP is very useful. Parameters and results of RPC calls can be structurally complex objects constructed in hierarchy. Since 1999-2000 RIST (research institute of system technologies, Ukraine, Kiev) developed such protocol (USP - Universal Service Protocol). We use it for communication with Object-Oriented database server (UOD) and for other tasks where object transmission and RPC is needed. The fourth version of USP specification is available here: http://search.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-shemsedinov-usp-03.txt. I understand that it is still rather crude, since it lags behind the real project. I think, if you will read this document, you will found in it many things for solving such problems as in your project. -- Best regards, Timur mailto:Timur@niist.ntu-kpi.kiev.ua