Re: DIME Use Case?

Eric,

While DIME and MIME attempt to solve similar problems (encoding data
for transmission over the wire), DIME has a few things in it which
make it easier to just open up a socket and push binary data down
through it. DIME is substantially easier to implement without a
supporting library whereas MIME is really quite painful, this
is mainly due to the work you have to do to recognise and act
accordingly with MIME's encoding schemes. With DIME its simple,
binary binary binary.

Where would you use DIME? Quite probably a P2P type application
would be a good place to use it. To add more structure you could
build SOAP messages and then place them into DIME messages for
your P2P application. This would remove the necessity to have a
HTTP server to work with SOAP. Your capability to do this would
depend largely on the SOAP infrastructure you are using, some of
the ones out there are tied to HTTP exclusively or are hard to
extend to support something like DIME as the transport encoding.

----------------------------------------
- Mitch Denny
- [email protected]
- +61 (414) 610-141
-

-----Original Message-----
From: Discussion of DIME technology [mailto:[email protected]] On
Behalf Of Eric Rescorla
Sent: Friday, 12 April 2002 01:03
To: [email protected]
Subject: [DIME] DIME Use Case?


I've read the DIME I-D and the mailing list archives, but it's still not
completely clear to me what the use case for DIME is indented to be. Can
someone either explain or point me to the relevant document?

The immediate question that comes to mind is:
DIME seems to cover a lot of the same territory as MIME. Therefore I
presume the idea is that there's some application for which you believe
MIME is inappropriate and you expect to use DIME instead. What is that
application?

-Ekr