Duane,
I (and everyone I talked to) think that you guys are a natural for this sort
of project, mostly because you're already in the testing business. As long
as the focus stays on the engineering level, and away from making it
competitive, this will be great.
Others will have more intelligent things to say about the organisation of
funding, membership, etc., but it would be nice if vendors who aren't
directly participating weren't cut out (e.g., six-month code delay), as
they're generally the people who need the most help.
How is the connect-a-thon organised in this respect?
A few points for discussion;
* What are the target devices for such tests?
Describing server and client as well as proxy/surrogate tests is useful, but
much more work, and it may turn out quite a bit harder (and more disruptive)
to pull the vendors on board.
I'd recommend starting with proxy/surrogate devices, and eventually
expanding into clients and servers if there's enough interest.
* What kinds of tests?
The most obvious goal is to prove full 1.1 compliance, according to stated
RFC2119 requirements. I think most people realise that doing so is actually
a very difficult task, because of all of the possible permutations of HTTP
mechanisms, etc that present themselves.
As I said in Lisbon, my interest is primarily in assuring that caches
operate in a predictable way to content providers; while we could test to
make sure that each message is well-formed, etc., IMHO that won't be
necessary, as it's already in the best interests of the vendor to do so.
It may be more realistic to define a relatively small group of relevant
tests to start with, making it easier to get a first go at it out quickly,
to gauge response and hopefully have some positive effects ASAP.
Finally, I'd be very surprised if any of the commercial vendors who showed
interest didn't have a pre-existing compliance engine that they use
interally. If one could be convinced/arm-twisted that it would be in their
best interests to donate it (or a portion), we'd save a lot of effort.
Cheers,
On Sun, Jun 04, 2000 at 06:45:06PM -0600, Duane Wessels wrote:
> During the workshop in Lisbon, many people mentioned the need for HTTP
> compliance tests. An analogy was made to the "connect-a-thon" that Sun
> has organized for NFS implementations. One nice feature of the
> connect-a-thon is that participating companies can not use the results
> to claim compliance in their marketing literature. It seems to be an
> engineering-only event to ensure that products interoperate with each
> other.
>
> My group would very much like to take on this role for HTTP
> compliance/interoperation testing. We are interested in developing
> software for vendors and others to use. We are willing to host
> "HTTP-a-thon" events if vendors would find it useful.
>
> Unfortunately, we probably don't have the resources at this time to
> pull it off. We need money to hire a programmer/coordinator. What
> follows is our plan for making it happen:
>
[snip]
>
> This is our proposal; nothing has been set in stone. I'm eager to find
> out if vendors and others think its a workable model. Feel free to
> follow up on this list, or reply to me personally.
-- Mark Nottingham, Senior Developer Akamai Technologies (San Mateo, CA)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Nov 18 2004 - 11:21:28 MST