[Osiris-devel]host daemon using XML ?

[Brian Wotring]

It has been suggested that we use XML to for the majority of 
communication between host modules and the management host.  I cannot 
see the advantage of this.  If somebody else does, please speak up.  To 
give a little background, there are three major kinds of communication 
that take place between the management host and a host daemon:

- control messages ( start scan, stop scan, are you awake, etc. )
- config data ( pushing a config to the daemon )
- scan data ( daemon returning scan results )

Messages consist of two parts, a header, and a body.  Almost all control 
messages consist of only a header and a null payload.  No need for XML 
for these messages.

The config parsing code of the daemon is already capable of parsing the 
native format of a config file so wrapping it in XML simply for 
transport would be a useless operation.

Scan data will eventually end up stored on disk by the management host.  
The goal is to store the data in such a way that a management host on 
any platform can read any database.   Thus, database records will be in 
a proprietary structure so that they can be read independent of the host 
architecture.  It makes sense for the daemon to place scan records into 
this structure before sending them.   This way the daemon doesn't have 
to have to contain functionality to create XML messages, and the 
messages themselves will be smaller.  The management host won't have to 
parse XML, but can simply store the record.

Any thoughts on this?  Am I smoking crack and not seeing a good reason 
as to why we need to use XML for any part of this communication?

--
   Brian Wotring ( brian at shmoo.com )
   PGP KeyID: 0x9674763D