Fed my book-buying habit today with the acquisition of the O’Reilly BEEP book. Build your own network protocol. Cool. BEEP looks very interesting as an alternative for all the contortions distributed application developers have to go through to make them work over HTTP. It provides a framework where most of the complex low-level stuff is done for you, and you just have to build your application-specific stuff on top of it. So the developer gets to decide whether the connection should be pull/push or both, stateless or stateful, pipelined or multiplexed etc. And security appears to be pluggable too.

I seem to remember Paul Hammant mentioning something about writing a BEEP module for AltRMI, which sounds like a great idea, especially for doing asynchronous callbacks. Must read more in case I’m totally wrong…