Custom Protocol over TCP

From: Jeffrey Spoon (JeffreySpoon_at_hotmail.com)
Date: 12/31/04 

Date: Fri, 31 Dec 2004 01:01:36 +0000

Hello I was toying with the idea of writing a relatively simple P2P
system. I decided using TCP would be the best bet and maybe UDP for
discovering other nodes. However, initially I was going to use binary
headers for my protocol to keep overhead down, but apparently this is
problematic and not at all friendly to anything non-C++, as well as
byte-ordering issues etc. Could be an issue as I'll be using Java...

Anyway, should I just use plain text for my protocol messages? It still
seems wasteful, as you're basically wasting 8 bits with each character,
whereas you could stuff a lot more info into a binary packet. I suppose
this is more of a general programming/networking question, but since I
will be using the Java I thought this was a good place to start.

Cheers. 

-- 
Jeffrey Spoon