Framing in Indigo

It seems obvious that the data in our web services needs to be framed. In the good old days, where all transport was HTTP this was rather trivial: HTTP headers are rich, and can describe Content-Type, Length etc.

But what happens if you select e.g. the net.tcp transport channel in Indigo?

Well, after pointing ethereal to the wire exchange, I came to the following conclusions:

• All session relevant settings (charset, etc.) are exchanged during the connection setup
  
• The length of the data is framed based on the relative TCP sequence number:
  
  
  
  • The initial relative TCP sequence number is 1
    
  • The next relative TCP sequence number is computed by adding the number of Bytes in the packet to the current TCP sequence number.

Interesting approach – standard TCP framing.