Most inter-object communication protocols encode message into blocks with its size encoded in front. This requires that the message is fully encoded to compute the size of blocks before it is sent.
A stream oriented protocol doesn't need this. The communication process can be pipelined. As shown in the figure below, this reduces the communication latency. Note that in a two way transaction the saving is doubled.
In absence of the block size, one needs a marker to signal the end of the block. For instance SOAP uses xml tags as markers. There are two drawbacks with such encoding: the marker can't show up in regular data and the marker must be searched to locate the end of a block. When the block size is available, locating the end of the block is trivial and very fast.
IDR and DITP combines the benefits of blocks and streams encoding by introducing a new encoding called BLEAM. Here is a short list of the their properties:
- bleams have no size limits
- bleams may be encapsulated with unlimited depth
- bleams impose no constrain on contained data
- no need to search and parse contained data to locate the end of bleam
The last property is what makes the difference with SOAP and its xml encoding.
See next blog note for a description of the bleam encoding.
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