BEEP: The Definitive Guide: Developing New Applications for the Internet

If you need to design a protocol that really fits your application, you want BEEP--an integrated collection of building blocks that gives you "best in class" data transmission solutions for everything from framing to security. Whether you're writing a simple "fetch" client/server application or a multi-threaded peer-to-peer relaying system, BEEP provides the necessary functionality without extra overhead. BEEP gives network developers what they've long needed: a standard toolkit for building protocols quickly and conveniently. For the first time, it's possible to create an application protocol that's tightly tuned to the application's requirements, so you can avoid reinventing the wheel. Written by BEEP creator Marshall Rose, BEEP: The Definitive Guide is the only book on the subject--a compendium straight from the horse's mouth. This book shows you what BEEP is for and, more important, how to put it to use. After explaining concepts underlying the BEEP protocol, Rose shows you how to use the BEEP implementation in Java, C, and Tcl. You'll learn to build several working applications that use BEEP as a transport, including an implementation of the reliable SYSLOG protocol and an implementation of a BEEP transport for SOAP. Although BEEP was standardized in 2001, different groups are already using it for SOAP exchanges, intrusion detection, instant messaging, network auditing, remote calendaring, and secure credential exchange. These groups work on different problems, but what they have in common is a simple desire to focus on the problem domain instead of the tedious details of protocol overhead. If you're a network developer, you need to become familiar with this important new tool.

Developers of distributed applications have started to embrace Blocks Extensible Exchange Protocol (BEEP), along with the far more established SMTP and HTTP, as transports for Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). BEEP: The Definitive Guide represents BEEP documentation that is literally authoritative: Marshall Rose wrote the BEEP specification as well as this book. Whatever the future of BEEP may be--and from many perspectives, it looks promising--this is the book you want to have on hand as you begin to use it for your requirements.

Most of Rose's initial work in this book has to do with explaining exactly what BEEP is good for--what kinds of problems it solves and how, and what kinds of problems it's not well suited to. It's important territory for the promoter of a protocol that aims to steal business from established competitors. Lots of conceptual diagrams show how messages pass back and forth between clients and servers, and how states change as a result of those messages. From there, Rose downshifts into discussions of how BEEP has been implemented in real programming languages--especially Java, but also C and Tcl--and how you can use BEEP in your own software. It's an absolutely accurate picture of a very promising technology in progress. --David Wall

Topics covered: A statement of what Blocks Extensible Exchange Protocol (BEEP) is good for, and how application developers can benefit from using it as a transport for messages between parts of distributed applications. Detailed attention goes to design and usage of the BEEP implementations in Java, C, and Tcl.