BEEP: The Definitive Guide (O'Reilly Networking)

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.