Socket Standard Workshop

Time:

Monday, April 9, 2001
1:30pm - 5:00pm

Goal:

The goal of this workshop is to define a standard API for creating and communicating with system sockets.

Non-Goal:

The goal is not to define a socket implementation of the standard API.

Considerations:

The goal of this workshop is to lay the groundwork for establishing a standard socket API (SSAPI) for the Smalltalk language. This API can then be used to write either complete socket object hierarchies or wrappers around existing socket implementations to provide programmers with the ability to write implementation and platform independent networking code in Smalltalk. Because of the high degree of variability that exists amongst current Smalltalk implementations, we should consider the following important constraints:

The SSAPI

• must not depend on functionality available on a strict subset of host operating platforms
• must provide a complete mapping to the functionality of the Berkeley Socket API
• must allow for handling platform errors generated by underlying primitive invocations of host socket functions in such a way that platform-specific idiosyncrasies in error signaling, semantics, and handling are recognized
• must allow for protocol-specific reporting and handling of host socket errors
• should be easily implemented in existing Smalltalk systems

SSAPI sockets (Sockets) will have several categories of behavior. These categories include (using arbitrary/temporary names):

• System Control Functions
• sysctl(3) et al.
• File Descriptor Manipulation
• fcntl(2)
• ioctl(2)
• dup(2)/dup2(2)
• stat(2)
• File Descriptor I/O Functions
• read(2)/readv(2)
• write(2)/writev(2)
• select(2) or poll(2)
• close(2)
• Socket Creation and State Change Functions
• socket(2)
• accept(2)
• bind(2)
• connect(2)
• listen(2)
• shutdown(2)
• getsockopt(2)/setsockopt(2)
• Socket I/O Functions
• recv(2)/recvfrom(2)/recvmsg(2)
• send(2)/sendto(2)/sendmsg(2)