On Mon, Mar 04, 2013 at 11:31:33AM +0100, Sven Neuhaus wrote:
> Am 02.03.2013 02:40, schrieb Andrew Sillers:
> > My proxy is a simple Websocket-to-TCP proxy, which can easily be run on
> > the same machine as the actual server. 
> 
> Nice. However, we want to take advantage of WebRTC's capability to use
> UDP! I think proxy-wise all we need to support WebRTC would be something
> to initiate the UDP peer2peer connection [in this case between the
> browser and the netrek server acting as WebRTC endpoint], we could
> hopefully reuse most of the normal netrek UDP protocol (inside WebRTC)
> once the packets are flowing.
> 
> Now, on the client side with JavaScript, the original binary Netrek
> protocol is probably a pain to deal with(?), so perhaps using something
> simple yet compact (JSON comes to mind) would be better (even at the
> cost of higher bandwidth usage).

Yes, the original binary Netrek protocol is somewhat difficult to deal
with using today's application languages, and has a few hidden
behaviours that are surprising.

JSON is used by the Gytha Netrek client for maintaining the
achievements data on the user's filesystem.  I picked it for minimum
coding time.

In the context of the network protocol though, JSON is a reasonable
tradeoff between compressibility, coding time, and performance.  It is
a well known format.

But I can't stop thinking of JSON as just another instance of Lisp
s-expressions!  ;-)

A server side protocol translator would not be difficult.  I don't see
any great need to tightly integrate it into the shared memory system
used by ntserv and daemon.

-- 
James Cameron
http://quozl.linux.org.au/