IETF Applications Area Architecture Workshop

February 15, 2008


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On February 11 and 12 Google hosted the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Application Area Architecture Workshop. This was a chance for people active in the IETF Applications Area to get together and work on architectural issues, topics that span many specific groups in the Applications area.

The Applications Area is the part of the IETF that deals with applications
"...that is, things that are not security (part of the security area), nor networks (most of the other areas), but rather things that use the networks and security services to provide things of benefit to the end-user."
This was of particular interest to me since that includes specifications like the Atom Syndication Format and the Atom Publishing Protocol, which we use extensively at Google. From the call for participation:
"These should be a few pages of text on some topic related to Applications area architectural issues. Since the group of attendees is expected to span HTTP and AtomPub, email, IM, calendaring, directories and more, issues should be of interest to more than one of these groups. Some existing Applications architecture "modules" that already are reused include SASL, URLs, MIME types, XML and XML schemas and namespaces, HTTP as a substrate, TLS, ABNF, BEEP."
We had around 20 attendees and the breakout sessions ranged over all the topics listed above and many more. There were two days of great conversation and everyone had a good time.
"Thank you for the high quality hosting and convenience of location and food!"

-Lisa Dusseault (Apps Area Director)