4 ms·

There must be some campaign of secrecy around ASN.1. When I mention it to otherwise well-informed developers, they have never heard of it. It doesn't help tha

by ct4ul4u 17y ago

There must be some campaign of secrecy around ASN.1. When I mention it to otherwise well-informed developers, they have never heard of it. It doesn't help that the really high performance marshalling libraries aren't open source.

eugenejen 17y ago
There was a real time blog search engine, pubsub.com. The internal messages was encoded in ASN.1. Bob Wyman, CTO of the pubsub.com was part of the ASN.1 committees in 80's. How can no one hear ASN.1? Andy Tanenbaum's Computer Network mentions it. SSL uses part of it.
- metajack 17y ago
  I've heard of it, but have no direct experience. Everyone I've met who has direct experience just shudders whenever it is mentioned. My understanding is that it is extremely complex and difficult to implement.
- bobwyman 17y ago
  Eugene, I wasn't actually a formal member of the standards committee, however, since my products at DEC (ALL-IN-1 mail, etc.) were some of the earliest to use ASN.1, I was very involved in the standardization process. ASN.1 is everywhere whether or not people realize it. Just about all telecommunications systems (cell phones, etc.) use it internally. As you say, SSL uses it -- since public key certificates are encoded in a form of ASN.1 also the IETF SNMP protocol relies on ASN.1. Other examples would include X.400 and X.500 standards and the LDAP which is a simplified version of X.500. You may be interested to know that internally at Google, we use the "Protocol Buffer" format instead of XML for all internal processing. That format is, like ASN.1 a "tag/length/value" binary encoding. For more information see: http://code.google.com/apis/protocolbuffers/ http://code.google.com/apis/protocolbuffers/
  - eugenejen 17y ago
    Bob, I know that. and Facebook uses Thrift which is now part of Apache incubator project. I may need to deal with some large data set with Cassandra database, which communicates with external programs in Thrift format messages. As a side note, I hope Google will finish real time search api soon and open the firehose :-)
tentonova 17y ago
The primary issues with ASN.1 seem to be that the availability libraries are poor and the documentation is both hard to find, and difficult to follow.

by ct4ul4u 17y ago

eugenejen 17y ago

There was a real time blog search engine, pubsub.com. The internal messages was encoded in ASN.1. Bob Wyman, CTO of the pubsub.com was part of the ASN.1 committees in 80's. How can no one hear ASN.1? Andy Tanenbaum's Computer Network mentions it. SSL uses part of it.

metajack 17y ago
I've heard of it, but have no direct experience. Everyone I've met who has direct experience just shudders whenever it is mentioned. My understanding is that it is extremely complex and difficult to implement.
bobwyman 17y ago
Eugene, I wasn't actually a formal member of the standards committee, however, since my products at DEC (ALL-IN-1 mail, etc.) were some of the earliest to use ASN.1, I was very involved in the standardization process. ASN.1 is everywhere whether or not people realize it. Just about all telecommunications systems (cell phones, etc.) use it internally. As you say, SSL uses it -- since public key certificates are encoded in a form of ASN.1 also the IETF SNMP protocol relies on ASN.1. Other examples would include X.400 and X.500 standards and the LDAP which is a simplified version of X.500. You may be interested to know that internally at Google, we use the "Protocol Buffer" format instead of XML for all internal processing. That format is, like ASN.1 a "tag/length/value" binary encoding. For more information see: http://code.google.com/apis/protocolbuffers/ http://code.google.com/apis/protocolbuffers/
- eugenejen 17y ago
  Bob, I know that. and Facebook uses Thrift which is now part of Apache incubator project. I may need to deal with some large data set with Cassandra database, which communicates with external programs in Thrift format messages. As a side note, I hope Google will finish real time search api soon and open the firehose :-)

tentonova 17y ago

The primary issues with ASN.1 seem to be that the availability libraries are poor and the documentation is both hard to find, and difficult to follow.