Comparisons

WATER vs. other pluggable transport designs

We evaluate WATER against other pluggable transport designs in terms of the following features:

  • Hot-swappable: Can the transport be loaded and unloaded without recompling the host application?
  • Host Isolation: Does the transport execute in an isolated environment (e.g., a sandbox) and with limited access to the host resources?
  • Compatibility Guarantee: Can the host application be transport-agnostic and still work with any transport that implements the interface?
  • Cross-language Deployment: Can the transport be implemented in a different programming language than the host application?
Feature PTs Marionette Proteus WATER
Hot-swappable ❌ ✅ ✅ ✅
Host Isolation ❌ ⚠️ ✅ ✅
Compatibility Guarantee ❌ ⚠️ ✅ ✅
Cross-language Deployment ❌ ❌ ❌ ✅

References