PUBLIC COMMENT PERIOD – FIX Simple Open Framing Header Release Candidate 1

1

This proposal from the High Performance Working Group entails the use of an FPL designed Simple Open Framing Header to provide a primitive message framing header that communicates two pieces of information, the length of a message and the encoding type of that message. It is intended to support existing and future encoding types and to have a set of encoding types to permit user defined encodings.

The technical standard proposal for the first release candidate for the FIX Simple Open Framing Header can be found here:
https://www.fixtrading.org/standards/fix-sofh

The proposal is following the technical standards review process described in the document found here:
https://www.fixtrading.org/fix-tech-std-lifecycle

This release candidate now enters a public comment period in which public review and feedback is encouraged. The public comment period will run for a period of 90 days beginning on Wednesday the 10th of September.

Please post feedback, comments, and questions as replies to this discussion thread.

2

Feedback received from a reviewer: “Why network byte order on the Simple Open Framing Header? Feels like trying to appease old school network thinking that is no longer relevant.”

3

There was no strong argument one way or the other. Byte swapping was not seen as a real obstacle for those that need little-endian instead of big-endian. Additionally, the framing header is optional and minimal in size. Making the byte order configurable for the framing header does not give an advantage as it requres extra processing. SBE works without a framing header and supports both byte orders (configurable via meta-data, little-endian as default).