A Simple XML Producer-Consumer Protocol

Abstract

This document describes a simple XML-based protocol that can be used for producers of events to communicate with consumers of events. The protocol described here is not meant to be the most efficient protocol, the most logical protocol, or the best protocol in any way. This protocol was defined quickly and it's intent is to give us a reasonable protocol that we can implement relatively easily and then use to gain experience in distributed event services. This experience will help us evaluate proposals for event representations, XML-based encoding of information, and communication protocols. The next section of this document describes how we represent events in this protocol and then defines the two events that we choose to use for our initial experiments. These definitions are made by example so that they are informal and easy to understand. The following section then proceeds to define the producer-consumer protocol we have agreed upon for our initial experiments.