Conformance

AEP Conformance

> Status: draft. Part of the AEP 0.1 protocol specification.

Purpose

Define observable compatibility levels for AEP implementations. Conformance levels are cumulative and describe externally visible behavior, not internal architecture.

Levels

AEP-C0: Envelope And Schema

An AEP-C0 implementation can parse AEP envelopes and validate shared schema assets.

Required behavior:

• Accept valid envelopes from shared conformance fixtures.
• Reject envelopes missing required fields.
• Reject unsupported protocol versions.
• Reject unknown or malformed standard event types.
• Validate schemas/aep-envelope.schema.json.
• Validate schemas/subscription-filter.schema.json when checking subscription filters.

AEP-C1: Core Runtime

An AEP-C1 implementation supports the core local runtime protocol. AEP-C1 includes all AEP-C0 behavior.

Required behavior:

• Process session open, ready, heartbeat, error, and close flows.
• Create, validate, and cancel subscriptions using standard filter fields.
• Route events according to type, source, target, topic, session, task, and metadata filters.
• Process task lifecycle events for accepted, started, progress, blocked, resumed, completed, failed, cancelled, and timed out states.
• Emit standard error payloads for invalid protocol actions.

AEP-C2: Delivery And Reliability

An AEP-C2 implementation supports observable delivery semantics for distributed or durable deployments. AEP-C2 includes all AEP-C0 and AEP-C1 behavior.

Required behavior:

• Track delivery sequence and cursor state.
• Process acknowledgement and negative acknowledgement events.
• Apply retry policy metadata consistently.
• Move exhausted deliveries to dead-letter state.
• Expose replay behavior through observable event sequences.

Shared Manifest

Shared conformance fixtures are described by conformance/manifest.json.

Manifest paths are relative to conformance/. A runner declares a target level and executes every fixture at or below that level. Runners must ignore higher-level fixtures unless explicitly configured to verify that level.

The default target level for AEP 0.1 draft reference runners is AEP-C1.

Fixture Expectations

accept_all means every fixture event must pass envelope and schema validation.

stateful_flow means every fixture event must pass validation and must be accepted by the reference harness without producing event.rejected.

reject_some is reserved for future negative fixtures.