The IDL (r)evolution is really taking place now. We’re slowly getting rid of the Samba3 DCE/RPC parsers that we were previously using and are moving towards new code generated from the IDL by pidl.
An increasing amount of dissectors of wireshark is now also generated from IDL, thanks to the work of Ronnie Sahlberg. There’s a list at their wiki.
It looks like Ethereal has been renamed to Wireshark. The reason specified on the website is the fact that Gerald (Ethereal’s founder) has switched jobs and apparently his old employer owned the trademark.
Together with a few others (Tim Potter, Alan De Kok) I have been working on parser generators in pidl for DCE/RPC interfaces over the last one-and-a-half years. However, none of our attempts got far enough to generate both clean and working code.
I sat down with Ronnie Sahlberg from Ethereal at the CIFS 2005 Conference and discussed some of the approaches he had taken in his idl2eth compiler (which is a big hack, but does generate nice code). With the help of Ronnie I was able to write a new module in about a day, taking to account some of the concerns the ethereal developers have.
See the new Parse::Pidl::Ethereal::NDR module for details. Hopefully Ethereal will adapt pidl with this new module for generating at least some of the DCE/RPC parser generators during the next month or so.
