I'm almost done with the first public draft of my latest essay, which will weigh in at over 40 pages. It's an essay about the various classic and contemporary protocols that have been, are, and shall be used to advertise and discover services.
It covers techniques classical methods such as: Well-known DNS aliases & RR types, DHCP, AppleTalk, NetBIOS, and IPX; and contemporary methods such as: DNS SRV records, DNS-SD & mDNS, SLP, UPnP & SSDP & LLMNR, LDAP, UDDI & WSDL, and JXTA.
I've just received permission (I thought it best to check first, since it was made on company time), to publish my essay About URIs [PDF]. I think you'll find it to be quite informative.
There's questions at the back that you can test yourself on (as well as answers). If you have any questions you can't answer for yourself after thinking it through yourself, feel welcome to ask.
I've just finished correcting my first essay on About URIs. Only minor spelling changes etc. Now at version 1.1
While reading the RFCs concerting LDAP (I was doing some research for my Service Discovery essay,) I learned that LDAP uses ASN.1.
ASN.1 is a very mature (and still maintained) ITU standard for specifying the protocol syntax for a protocol. What makes it so cool is that you specify your “abstract syntax” (in a manner similar to a grammar), which you can then compile using an ASN.1 compiler, to turn it into program code for coding/decoding the resultant “transfer syntax” to/from its “concrete syntax” (language-specific form, such as a C structure).
I'v been busy the last couple of weeks sorting out lab stuff, so I've had little time for finishing up this essay, but I've done it, and so here is the first public version. I'd really appreciate any feedback, especially if you have a good working knowledge of technologies such as: AppleTalk, IPX, NetBIOS, SLP, Directory Services (LDAP, AD, eDirectory).