An Application Protocol Framework & A Model Applic
charter-ietf-blocks-01

Historically, each Internet application protocol has defined its own
set
ofb rules for exchanging control and data information. Although there
are a lot of similarities (e.g., dot-stuffing in SMTP and POP, octet
counts in HTTP and IMAP, 3-digit reply codes in FTP and SMTP), there
isn't a lot of reuse of design. As a result, designers of new
application protocols usually have to make the same set of design
decisions - over and over again - to deal with the same set of
trade-offs, but usually without the benefit of large amount of
institutional history.

The BOF introduces a generic application protocol framework (called
BXXP) for connection-oriented, asynchronous, request-response
interactions over TCP. This particular subset of the problem supports a
large class of Internet applications, whilst providing solutions to
common design issues for those applications, including: framing,
segmentation, structuring, and multiplexing of messages, along with an
authentication and privacy over the transport.

A framework requires a real-world proof of concept. Blocks is an
architecture for managing metadata and defines an exchange model for
organizing information into navigation spaces. The Blocks system is the
model application for BXXP. The BOF introduces the issues of metadata
management and describes how the Blocks architecture addresses those
issues. As proof of completeness, the current Blocks implementation has
over 25TB of data and metadata spinning.