Re: [6lowapp] Proposed charter for 6LoWAPP BOF

[Juergen Schoenwaelder <[e-mail]>]

On Wed, Nov 04, 2009 at 10:04:01AM +0100, Zach Shelby wrote:
 
> The charter is actually saying that REST alone is not sufficient.  
> Multicast is listed (or should be better listed). It will also be  
> possible to realize RPC over CoAP, and thus someone could even use  
> this for WS_* messaging if they wanted to. Just as it works with HTTP.  
> Do you have some specific text changes in mind to make that more  
> clear? Now it lists multicast, push, pull and notification.

I have been following this discussion silently and it seems there are
pretty diverging opinions of the applications targeted by CoAP. Some
people apparently just want to read simple meters from lots of truely
resource constrained (thus cheap) devices and do very limited control
actions.  Others seem to see a need for a rather complex^Hcomplete
middleware instrastructure to be developed, including new transports
to support it (and not much discussion of the necessary security
infrastructure needed to support it has yet been seen here). Some
poeple might believe there is a magic silver bullet to support all
application scenarios equally well - I personally have some doubts
about the existance of it or that it can be found quickly. This goes
to the expectation that all the new protocols will be worked out and
standardized fast enough to meet aggressive industry consortia
deadlines of "tomorrow".

In my experience, the IETF is working best by breaking things down in
manageable pieces and assigning priorities to them. I believe this
needs to be done sooner rather than later here as well. Building a
long wishlist of things CoAP is expected to nicely interface with
seems like moving into the wrong direction (except you take a rather
liberal interpretation of "interfacing nicely" - the hard stuff is
often in the detailed semantics and their mismatches).

/js

-- 
Juergen Schoenwaelder           Jacobs University Bremen gGmbH
Phone: [phone]         Campus Ring 1, 28759 Bremen, Germany
Fax:   [phone]         <http://www.jacobs-university.de/>