FreeProtocol |
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This is the official FreeProtocol web site. It contains basic information about using it. Hopefully you will find what you need here.
Download the latest version of FreeProtocol:
Source and Binary
FreeProtocol is intended for use in applications that need client/server communication with open or custom protocols.
I created this project because I was writing a client/server software in which the communication protocol wasn't fully defined. As the application started to grow and new needs arose, I found it would be nice to be able to say some magic words, and the server would start to understand what the clients were saying to it, without having to rewrite the server's code.
I started to look at what already was defined in the protocol and found some "logic rules", which I found could be managed by a simple piece of software. I wrote a "draft" on a weekend (I know, I know, but I had nothing to do) and it worked so nice, that I decided to release the code.
The idea is very simple. On startup the server reads the XML file with the definition of the protocol. This definition tells the server what commands it can expect, what answers are allowed for each command, and what business methods should be called as soon as a command arrives. The business method called does what it has to do, and returns a code representing one of the possible answers. Quite simple, isn't it?
I do not recommend it for Internet applications yet, since security should still be improved. Actually, there's a lot of things that will have to be improved, but FreeProtocol will already work for a variety of needs.
Since the syntax is very simple, I recommend you download the package and look for the examples included. JDOM is needed for it to work. You can download JDOM from this site.
Since July 2006