About this Handbook

The intention of the TLS Pool Handbook is to provide the documentation of the TLS Pool in one place, which is clearly structured and supportive of linear reading. We found that most things had been written down somewhere, but that the TLS Pool represented a sufficiently big paradigm shift that it warranted somewhat longer and more structured documentation.

The purpose of the TLS Pool Handbook is to give you a complete overview of what makes you get aquainted with the approach, and use it in everyday practice. In doing so, it may reference external documentation, but at least it shows the way that various things are related.

If anything in this Handbook is unclear or does not address your concerns, and you think it would serve the community if it did, then please file an issue if it has not come up before; we would like to talk it over and help you find a resolution. In return, you may of course be asked to review our updates to the Handbook, so we can learn if your issue has been sufficiently resolved.

This Handbook was written by Rick van Rein, who also designed and programmed the original TLS Pool, and who continues to maintain it. Rick is also the principal architect of the InternetWide Architecture and sees to it that the TLS Pool is well-ingrained with the philosphy and goals of this project and other ARPA2 development projects.

The SteamWorks project is related to the TLS Pool, albeit loosely. It is another component of the aforementioned InternetWide / ARPA2 family of projects. We use it to subscribe to remote configuration information sources for the TLS Pool, but it is suitable for doing similar things for a much, much broader range of purposes. And that is by design; when we get to the point where we facilitate differentiated hosting with web-enabled backends, we are going to need it to distribute all sorts of configuration information form a domain’s identity host to any and all plugged-in hosted services.