To quote the W3C statement, "The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) has been in use by the World Wide Web global information initiative since 1990. HTTP is an application-level protocol for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. It is a generic, object-oriented protocol which can be used for many tasks, such as name servers and distributed object management systems, through extension of its request methods (commands). A feature of HTTP is the typing and negotiation of data representation, allowing systems to be built independently of the data being transferred." The W3C web page on HTTP is available at http://ww.w3.org/pub/WWW/Protocols/HTTP/, and is an excellent source of information about HTTP. In particular, see the performance measurements of HTTP 1.1 vs. 1.0, at http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Protocols/HTTP/Performance/Pipeline.html, for an interesting discussion of performance effects with several slight changes to the protocol.
DCE RPC is an RPC system used as the basis for the OSF Distributed Computing Environment (DCE). See http://www.osf.org/mall/dce/free_dce.htm for more information. Unfortunately, you have to register with the OSF to look at the protocol specification. Also unfortunately, the various DCE papers available online at http://www.osf.org/comm/lit/lit-dce.html recently did not include either OSF-O-WP10-1090-2, `Remote Procedure Call in a DCE white paper', or DEV-DCE-TP5-1, `RPC Technology Standardization and OSF's DCE technical paper'. However, digital forms of these papers have been provided, and they should be available shortly. Rich Salz and Paul Leach have recently documented the DCE UUID scheme in http://info.internet.isi.edu/in-drafts/files/draft-leach-uuids-guids-00.txt, which might prove useful for NG UUIDs (with minor tweaks).
ONC RPC is an RPC system used in the Open Network Computing architecture, currently under consideration as an Internet standard. See Internet RFC 1831, RFC 1832, and RFC 1833 for a specification of the system, and RFC 1790 for the agreement between the Internet Society and Sun Microsystems about the use of ONC RPC. See the latest Internet RFC on `INTERNET OFFICIAL PROTOCOL STANDARDS' (RFC 1920, as of 10/28/96), for a description of the current status of ONC RPC as an Internet standard.
The wire protocol for the CORBA Internet Inter-ORB protocol, IIOP, is available on the web as http://www.omg.org/coriiop/giop.htm.
A description of some protocol closely related to the DCOM protocol is available at http://www.microsoft.com/oledev/olecom/dcomspec.txt. However, this does not seem to match the actual packets observed coming from the implementation of DCOM on Windows/NT 4.0, so take it with a grain of salt.
The MUX protocol being developed by the W3C is probably going to be a required part of the new protocol, so look it over and comment at http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Protocols/MUX/.
The T/TCP documents, Internet RFCs 1644 and 1379, give an interesting discussion of the issues involved in using TCP/IP as a basis for request-response protocols. The original TCP spec, RFC 793 should also be familiar to everyone.
ILU information is available at ftp://ftp.parc.xerox.com/pub/ilu/ilu.html, and the manual for ILU is available at ftp://ftp.parc.xerox.com/pub/ilu/2.0a9/manual-html/manual_toc.html.
