In my case, as described in recent blog posts, I had run into serious problems with the BEEP implementation I’d been using for five months. I considered how much time I’d already dumped into fixing and improving that library (and how awful its code was to work with) and decided that I had to rip it out and use something else. But there wasn’t anything else available. So I was left with writing my own. And I did not have the time or energy to attempt to implement the BEEP protocol, so I sat down and worked out a minimal set of features that I needed, and decided on the easiest way to represent them, in kind of a BEEP-like way, in a protocol.

If you really want to use BEEP, then go have a look at Vortex. Just be aware that the source code is very ugly C, it uses more threads than it needs to, it doesn’t implement the whole BEEP protocol (very limited MIME support) and by omitting MIME headers it happens to be fatally incompatible with any compliant BEEP implementation.

Or you could just write your own BEEP framework in Obj-C. But either way, stop bugging me about what I decided to do, for my own purposes, and then kindly shared with the world.

If you need a protocol like this that’s been standardized, look at BEEP. (But be warned that BLIP came about precisely because of my dissatisfaction with available BEEP implementations.)

I think the majority of peer-to-peer applications could do with the simpler heuristics of BLIP—so well done indeed!

BLIP is good for sending large numbers of lightweight request/response pairs, or for large interleaved requests (since it’s better at pipelining than most HTTP implementations.) It also provides both sides of the connection symmetrically, whereas with HTTP you need a separate client and server.

Phone-to-phone sounds like it would work OK with Bonjour; but from what I’m told, the cell carriers don’t allow incoming TCP connections over EDGE.

I am interested in doing some phone to phone networking on the iPhone for a simple turn based game. Do you think that BLIP would be well suited?

Thanks
Brian

The details of the protocol are in the file “BLIP/BLIP Overview.txt”. It was hastily written, but I think everything needed is in there.