Old Protocols for a New Web

When I say "New Web" I mean a hypothetical, non-existent internet that uses existing technology in novel ways to improve efficiency and presentation. And Ruby's a great language for prototyping this.


My first project with Ruby is an implementation of TFTP. TFTP is a poor man's FTP. It has three RFC's, all short and sweet. Here are the things that makes it nice:

(1) simple. It's a small protocol, and so anyone can implement it. It's so small and so useful that it's used to boot up routers.

(2) proven. Again, it's one of the first applications ported to a new server. It's how servers get upgraded. That should tell you something about its utility.

(3) relatively non-hackable. Again, due to its simplicity. Especially if it's read-only, i.e. doesn't support writing files.

(4) fast. Because it's built on UDP, there's very low overhead, and no expensive handshaking, TCP nailup costs, etc.

(5) svelte. Again, because it uses UDP, there's no TCP nailup cost, and other associated expensive processing.

(6) synchronous. Because UDP has a willy-nilly transmission style, TFTP synchronizes transfer with numbered packets and does its own ACKs, retransmits, etc. If you thought UDP was unreliable, well, there's ways around that, and those ways are easy.

I'm still working on the implementation, but preliminary results are encouraging. The only discouraging thing is that servers generally lock down UDP transmissions as a rule. That's just something I'm going to have to face: it's not secure as-is, what with the ability to write files at will into the target file system.

BUT, what I want to do is implement browser functionality using TFTP as the transport mechanism. This means it's a read-only protocol... or, more correctly, "writes" are translated as "posts" rather than file transfers. So, no writing files directly into the file system. This puts security on par with current browsers.

Of course, on top of TFTP would have to be a new kind of browser, but that's a nontrivial task that I'll leave for the future. Perhaps it can just be a plugin for Firefox. And then, there's the question of what the presentation layer is going to be. CSS and HTML? Sure, but the scientific community is not served by these hacked styles. I want a TeX display layer. Once again, that's another nontrivial task that I'll have to leave for the future. I'll be happy just to get TFTP working.