Re: Roadmap for FE/BE protocol redesign

Hannu Krosing wrote:
> Tom Lane kirjutas K, 12.03.2003 kell 18:19:
>
>>Actually, my hope is to eliminate that business entirely by
>>standardizing the on-the-wire representation for binary data; note the
>>reference to send/receive routines in the original message.  For integer
>>data this is simple enough: network byte order will be it.  I'm not sure
>>yet what to do about float data.
> 
> 
> Use IEEE floats or just report the representation in startup packet.
> 
> the X11 protocol does this for all data, even integers - the client
> expresses a wish what it wants and the server tells it what it gets (so
> two intel boxes need not to convert to "network byte order" at both
> ends).

IIOP/CDR behaves similarly for performance reasons- "receiver 
makes it right". It also defines a representation for all of the 
CORBA idl basic types, wide characters, fixed-point types, 
structures, etc. A far-reaching, wild suggestion would be to 
replace the postmaster with a CORBA-based server process with a 
well defined interface. At a minimum, if a binary protocol is 
the ultimate destination, perhaps some of the mapping of various 
types could be borrowed from the specs.

Mike Mascari
mascarm@mascari.com