In-band vs. out-of-band signaling in programming

In telecommunications, you need to transmit data, but also signals that indicate information about connections - signals like "create a connection", "close a connection" etc. This information can be transferred in multiple ways: inside the data channel, or outside. This is usually called "in-band signaling" or "out-of-band signaling". DTMF is a good example of in-band signaling. You press a number on your phone, the phone generates a sound, and the sound can be heard in the other end. This is different from HTTP, where the protocol wraps the content, so that the content cannot change the HTTP information.

In programming, we have something similar. Out-of-band signaling looks like this:

procedure StringToInt (s:string;var i:integer; 
  var error:boolean);

Here, the error code is delivered separately from the return value. An in-band signaling type example is:

function StringToInt (s:string):integer;
// Returns 0 if s is not a valid integer

Here, a default value is returned, if the string is not readable. In other words, the return value can be an error code or a value, and the error code could strictly be interpreted as a value.

The basic properties of in-band signalling are:

* A sends at least 2 kinds of communication to B through system C
* System C cannot distinguish the different kinds of communication

A good example is the utf-8 character encoding system. Most ISO-8859-1 applications can handle utf-8, even though they were not designed for it. Kylix was not designed for utf-8, but you could write utf-8 source code, and create utf-8 applications using Kylix, fully unicode enabled. Also, many text-file command-line tools that were designed for ISO-8859-1, work perfectly with utf-8, unmodified.

XML is another good example. XML files can be transported, filtered, stored, reformatted and handled in many ways, without specifying what kinds of information the XML file actually contains. You can transmit different kinds of XML files through a generic XML communications channel, and only the sender and the receiver understand the difference.

One of the oldest and most well known examples is probably ASCII. The character A is a letter, with the code 65. Ringing the bell has code 7, and returning the carriage has code 13. All you need is to transmit a 7-bit code, and you can make the remote device make sounds, feed paper, print multiple characters on top of each other etc.

Does in-band signaling make sense? Yes. Many of the most successful data formats use in-band signaling. Does it always make sense? No. I can mention lots of reasons why, but the list is too long to mention here. One is very important, though: In-band signaling is often mentioned as a security problem - think of SQL injection.

Try to imagine programming, where a string could not contain multiple lines. How would programming have evolved? We wouldn't have TStrings.Text, we wouldn't have the ability to save multiline texts in a string field. Maybe we had solved this differently. Or not.