[Etiquette-announce] ANN: Etiquette: a protocol construction tool

[Eugene Z. <vi...@fu...>]

Announcement of Etiquette v0.3
==============================

Etiquette is an interaction protocol construction toolkit.  The
project goal is to build a framework for rapid design of network
communication code. Etiquette interaction protocols are intended to
describe valid communication processes that can occur in networked
applications, along with error-handling code. Etiquette provides
protocol tracing and single-stepping support.

Etiquette is hosted at SourceForge and is distributed under the terms
of the General Public License. The project page can be found at
http://sourceforge.net/projects/etiquette.

Project quickstart guide can be viewed at:
http://sourceforge.net/docman/display_doc.php?docid=17729&group_id=84118.

Features implemented:
- Interaction protocols
- Support for implementation of legacy protocols
- Basic error handling
- Debugging facilities
- TCP/IP and file socket communication transports
- Protocols can be encapsulated as transports

Platforms supported:
- CMU CL with db-sockets package
- SBCL (wasn't extensively tested)

No operating systems other than GNU/Linux on x86 hardware were tested.


Notes for version 0.3
=====================

- (Non-conforming) subsets of SMTP and HTTP are included
- A sample file retrieval protocol was added
- Protocols can now be terminated at an arbitrary point with special
  termination clause
- Both buffered and stream I/O are now supported
- Error handling support improved
- TCP transport now performs accept/listen dispatching via resource
  controllers
- Project design notes are attached to the source tree


Future work
===========

- Sibling protocols support
- Anonymous protocol subsections
- Extended error and security hazard reporting
- Compile-time protocol validation
- Extending the corpus of sample interaction protocols