The (maybe only) good thing about there being no reference implementation is that we get feedback on the protocol itself and not the characteristics of a particular implementation.
In this first phase, we are providing tools to ease independent implementation. We think it would be a sign of health that the specs are (become) good enough to create interoperable implementations from. We will make our plans known as they develop. We are doing more with the core protocol next.
One thing I sorely missed when working with FAST was an official and comprehensive test suite. A wide set of templates and encoded files to exercise all the nooks and crannies of the spec would have been very useful.
It looks like blink has far fewer special cases so the need for an official test suite might not be as great. Might be something worth considering anyway.
agreed, a test suite will be essential for implementors. I'd be very interested to hear you thoughts on this. Please mail me if you have interest.
Rolf
