One of my reasons for developing an implementation of RELOAD is to be able to develop an implementation of VIPR, a mechanism currently developed by the IETF to automatically and securely share SIP routes between VoIP providers. VIPR is using RELOAD as a giant distributed database where VoIP providers stores the phone numbers of their customers.
RELOAD in its last incarnation has all the features needed to implement VIPR, with two exceptions, the access control policy and the quota mechanism.
The access control policy in VIPR is similar to the standard USER-NODE-MATCH policy, but there is enough differences to mandate the implementation of a new policy. The preferred solution is to implement natively this policy, but a temporary solution could be to use the extension I designed to add new policies in the RELOAD configuration file. A future version of my implementation will implementation this policy natively, but meanwhile the following script can be used:
var equals = function(a, b) {
if (a.length !== b.length) return false;
for (var i = 0; i < a.length; i++) {
if (a[i] !== b[i]) return false;
}
return true;
};
var length = configuration.node_id_length;
return equals(entry.key.slice(0, length),
entry.value.slice(4, length + 4))
&& equals(entry.key.slice(0, length), signature.node_id);
The quota mechanism in VIPR is interesting. Basically it says that a VoIP provider must contribute a number of RELOAD servers for the distributed database that is proportional to the number of phone numbers it plans to register. Because this quota mechanism is useful for other usages than VIPR it now has its own Internet-Draft, separate from the VIPR drafts, with the goal of publishing it as an IETF standard. New quota mechanisms are not very frequently needed (AFAIK, this is the first quota mechanism created outside the RELOAD document) so it does not make sense to develop another API to write quota scripts. This means that this quota mechanism will have to be coded by RELOAD implementers (the VIPR configuration document should contain a <mandatory-extension> element to be sure that only servers implementing this extension will join the overlay).
Version 0.5.0 of the libreload-java package, that was released few minutes ago, not only permits to use the script listed above but also implement the new quota mechanism, making it suitable for implementing a VIPR server.
Update 07/05/2011: The VIPR access control policy is natively implemented in lib-reload-java 0.6.0.