April 05, 2005

A good introduction to SIP

SIP it the the session initiation protocol standard for starting voice-over-IP calls, among other things. It's been quite the buzz in the IETF for the past few years, and many people are predicting that it will become as important to the Internet as SMTP and HTTP.

I was looking around on Google for recommendations on introductions to SIP, and then asked a friend who is a SIP guru. His response was "read the RFC". Surprisingly, he turned out to be correct. The first 25 pages of the RFC (which clocks in at a somewhat-terrifying 269 pages) did a better job of explaining what SIP is, giving an overview of how it works, and showing a typical example, than the handful of PDFs and web pages I had grabbed first.

If only all RFCs for major standards were this good.... Posted by lookit at April 5, 2005 06:29 AM