[Standards] Proposed XMPP Extension: IO DATA

[Tobias Markmann]

On Sun, Mar 30, 2008 at 2:16 AM, Johannes Wagener
<johannes.wagener at med.uni-muenchen.de> wrote:
>
> Proposed XMPP Extension: IO DATA
>
>  Hello,
>  here I submit a proposal for a new XEP called "IO DATA".
>
>  The XEP is already located in the XEP inbox directory:
>   URL: http://www.xmpp.org/extensions/inbox/io-data.html
>
>  However, the initial version is erroneously missing some namespaces in
>  the examples, therefore we append the current fixed version as PDF to
>  the mail directly to the standards mailing list.
>
>  Abstract: This specification defines an XMPP protocol extension for
>  handling the input to and output from a remote entity.
>
>  Further explanation comes here:
>  We want to do dynamic Web Services over XMPP. For certain reasons we
>  explain in the XEP we think neither SOAP over XMPP nor Jabber-RPC is the
>  way to go. We think future asynchronous Web Services can be best
>  implemented with the session based Ad-Hoc Commands XEP-0050.
>
>  Thus, and as already suggested in Ad-Hoc Commands we describe an
>  alternative data container IO DATA that can transport more complex data
>  than Data Forms. The specification describes a way to discover the
>  Schemata of the IO DATA input and output at runtime, too. Thus a client
>  implementation can dynamically marshal an API for the input and output
>  of a certain service.
>
>  Johannes
>

+1
This data container is really useful for a lot applications. Through
my development of the Data Form Designer Suite for XMPP I've learned a
lot about x-data and ad-hoc enhancement proposals. This showed me that
ad-hoc commands which aren't emitted by humans might not need the
overhead of static forms and structure. That's why this XEP is useful
for all future machine-to-machine application and will largely ease
development of them.
Best of all there is already a working implementation so the concept
has been more than proven.

Cheers
Tobias