Marshall Rose, "On BEEP":

"Unfortunately, most application protocol design has not enjoyed as excellent a history as TCP. Engineers design protocols the way monkeys try to get to the moon that is, by climbing a tree, looking around, and finding another tree to climb."

I am taking a hard look at BEEP again since I have a small need for a network protocol but am too smart (read: lazy) to want to build the handshake and transport myself. Focusing on the marshalling is enough work for me. I have been following BEEP since it was called BXXP (aren't I cool?) and have been itching to use it.

SubEthaEdit uses BEEP. Read on, proles:

"For v2.0, you've moved the low-level networking to the BEEP protocol (blocks extensible exchange protocol). What led you to BEEP, and then to choose it as your networking layer over other protocols?"

"We researched a lot of options for a new network protocol. We wanted efficiency, extensibility and something that would fit our requirements without being an ugly hack. We had evaluated a few technologies and chose BEEP because it was the best fit for what we were trying to do.

BEEP provides a simple and most importantly standardized framework for everything you will have to handle when you design and implement a network protocol, that deserves the name. It's an IETF standard (RFC 3080) and as we recently found out is also used in Apple's Xgrid software.

Having our own Objective-C implementation of BEEP powering our networking layer has great advantages: If we want to add a feature like TLS encryption or authentification in the future, we should be able to do so without breaking compatibility with the current protocol.

Secondly BEEP enables us to do more stuff more efficiently than before with e.g. reduced resource load by using multiplexed channels over a single connection or better status channel capabilities. Last but not least we won't have to implement a networking stack for another application when we write one; we can just take our BEEP library and create a profile for the new application."