Re: [boost] Bidirectional streams/archives - Frames

Subject: Re: [boost] Bidirectional streams/archives - Frames
From: Jeremiah Willcock (jewillco_at_[hidden])
Date: 2010-10-27 18:05:22

On Wed, 27 Oct 2010, vicente.botet wrote:

> Hi,
>
> The use I have is to implement binary messages that are user through 
> protocol stacks. When sending a message, lower layers add usualy headers 
> and trailers to payload comming from the upper layer. When receiveing a 
> message, lower layers extract its corresponding headers and trailers 
> before passing the payload to the upper layer.
>
> I'm thinking in generalizing the stream or archive concept, so we could 
> in addition to been able to read from the begining and write at the end, 
> been also able to read from the end and write from the begining; a kind 
> of bidirectional stream or archive.
>
> I was thinking in namming the concept "frame", as frames are usualy 
> composed of header, payload and trailer. Do you have other namming 
> sugestion? Could this concept have any interest for Boost?
>
> Please, let me know if there is already someting on Boost or the 
> standard library that could help me.

One thing I would suggest reading is 
<URL:ftp://ftp.cs.unc.edu/pub/techreports/93-047.pdf>; it describes 
several systems for managing messages (with headers and trailers) in 
network protocols.  Especially, you might want to look at the x-kernel and 
its data structures (see section 3.2 of that report) for messages.  The 
x-kernel's home page is at 
<URL:http://www.cs.arizona.edu/projects/xkernel/>; you can get titles of 
more detailed papers to search for there.

-- Jeremiah Willcock