Towards a Modern Communications API

The authors contend that a new networking API could better serve the needs of data- and service-oriented applications, and could more easily map to heterogeneous environments, than the pervasive Sockets API does. In this paper, they present an initial design of a networking API based on the publish/subscribe paradigm, along with an exploration of its security implications, examples to demonstrate several common use cases, and a discussion of how the implementation of such an API could leverage a wide range of networking technologies. They propose this model not as a final design but as the first step towards a wider community discussion of the need for a modern communications API.