At last, installable packages for OpenJDK 7 are available in the experimental Debian repository. So I released a new version of jarc that is now directly supporting Java 7 code but, because the openjdk-7 packages are in an experimental repository, I uploaded jarc 0.2.21 in an experimental repository so people would not be hit with dependency issues. I updated my Ubuntu/Debian repository page to explain how to add my experimental repository to the repository configuration file.
The reason to release this experimental version of jarc is that I need two the new features of the new JVM for my RELOAD implementation. The first one is the support of TLS 1.2, aka RFC 5246, which is used by RELOAD to authenticate and encrypt all the TCP connections. The only thing missing to completely implement RELOAD will be an implementation of DTLS 1.0 (which is to datagrams what TLS is to streams). I guess I will have to bite the bullet and write this one myself.
The second feature that I needed is an implementation of the SCTP protocol. TCP is great for transferring files but it has one major flaw when used with multiplexed client/server transactions, which is called the Head-Of-Line problem – a message lost will block all the subsequent messages, even if they belong to a different transaction, until the lost message is retransmitted and received. UDP does not have this issue but comes with its own set of problems. SCTP is somewhere between UDP and TCP, and this is why, in my opinion, it is a good transport protocol for something like RELOAD (well, between RELOAD nodes with a public IP address, as most NATs – one exception been the one I supervised the development at 8×8 – do not NAT SCTP).
So the plan will be to add SCTP to RELOAD, using either TLS (RFC 3436) or DTLS (RFC 6083) depending on the DTLS implementation described above, and to write an I-D, perhaps in time for IETF 81 in Quebec City.