Application World: Roll-your-own Binary Protocol

• Defined interfaces as a messages to send and receive
• Application-dependent
• Optimizing network bandwidth
• Point-to-point
• Distributable across processes, machines

And Now, The Bad News

• May need vendor libraries for it to work, in practice
• Subject to change without notice if proprietary
• Numerical representation problems, byte-ordering problems, interpretation problems
• Hellish to debug: implement it wrong and things Just Don't Work or they Just Crash Your Computer (or Network)

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Copyright (c) 2001 Mary Holstege
All rights reserved.