ASN.1
I am currently reading O’Reilly’s Kerberos: The Definitive Guide by Jason Garman. It has introduced me to ASN.1, a notation to define data structures for communication between heterogeneous systems in an extensible manner. There is some overlap between the issues ASN.1 solves and the issues XML solves. However, as a data transport tool, ASN.1 is much more flexible. In fact, two of the transport specifications for ASN.1 use XML.
My greatest interest in ASN.1 is the promise of its extensibility. The asn1.org Web site mentions that one of the benefits is:
Write once and use forever. ASN.1 notation has built-in features that allow you to make changes and to add to your application in the future without disruption to what you have completed today. With ASN.1, you no longer have to waste your precious resources worrying about backward compatibility.
This technology looks like a good way to handle the definition of any non-HTTP client-server communication or any peer-to-peer communication.
I am looking for a Java implementation, preferably free, to play with and get a feeling for the learning curve. There exist two projects at SourceForge: the Cryptix ASN.1 Kit, in alpha under a BSD-style license, and Better ASN, which is stable and developed by Twarte Technologies, but GPL’d. There is a commercial Java ASN.1 solution at oss.com.
