computer networking A computer network is a set of computers sharing resources located on or provided by network nodes. The computers use common communication protocols over digital interconnections to communicate with each other. These interconnections are ...

, a wire protocol refers to a way of getting

data In the pursuit of knowledge, data (; ) is a collection of discrete values that convey information, describing quantity, quality, fact, statistics, other basic units of meaning, or simply sequences of symbols that may be further interpret ...

from point to point: A wire protocol is needed if more than one application has to interoperate. It generally refers to

communication protocol A communication protocol is a system of rules that allows two or more entities of a communications system to transmit information via any kind of variation of a physical quantity. The protocol defines the rules, syntax, semantics and synchroniza ...

s higher than the physical layer. In contrast to

transport protocol Transport (in British English), or transportation (in American English), is the intentional movement of humans, animals, and goods from one location to another. Modes of transport include air, land (rail and road), water, cable, pipeline ...

s at the transport level (like TCP or UDP), the term ''wire protocol'' is used to describe a common way to exchange information at the application level. It refers to an

application layer An application layer is an abstraction layer that specifies the shared communications protocols and interface methods used by hosts in a communications network. An ''application layer'' abstraction is specified in both the Internet Protocol Su ...

protocol and defines all the required attributes for the data exchange, like data types (units of data, message formats, etc.), communication endpoints and capabilities (such as delivery guarantees, direction of communication, etc.). Usually, the data is represented at the application level as a common

infoset XML Information Set (XML Infoset) is a W3C specification describing an abstract data model of an XML document in terms of a set of ''information items''. The definitions in the XML Information Set specification are meant to be used in ''other'' s ...

(e.g.

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. T ...

JSON JSON (JavaScript Object Notation, pronounced ; also ) is an open standard file format and data interchange format that uses human-readable text to store and transmit data objects consisting of attribute–value pairs and arrays (or other se ...

YAML YAML ( and ) (''see '') is a human-readable data-serialization language. It is commonly used for configuration files and in applications where data is being stored or transmitted. YAML targets many of the same communications applications as Ext ...

) and requires a mechanism of data binding (using e.g. a common encoding scheme like

XSD XSD (XML Schema Definition), a recommendation of the World Wide Web Consortium ( W3C), specifies how to formally describe the elements in an Extensible Markup Language (XML) document. It can be used by programmers to verify each piece of item con ...

). The wire protocol may be either text-based or a

binary protocol A communication protocol is a system of rules that allows two or more entities of a communications system to transmit information via any kind of variation of a physical quantity. The protocol defines the rules, syntax, semantics and synchroniza ...

. Although an important architectural decision, this is a separate matter from the distinction between wire protocols and programmatic APIs. In

electronics The field of electronics is a branch of physics and electrical engineering that deals with the emission, behaviour and effects of electrons using electronic devices. Electronics uses active devices to control electron flow by amplification ...

, a wire protocol is the mechanism used to transmit data from one point to another.

Functionality

A wire protocol provides the means for the interoperation of one or more applications in a network. They often refer to distributed object protocols, or they use applications that were designed to work together. As the name suggests, these distributed object protocols run in different processes in one or several computers that are connected over a network.

Types

Wire protocols provide the means for a program running under one operating system to communicate with a program running under some other operating system over a network such as an organization's

intranet An intranet is a computer network for sharing information, easier communication, collaboration tools, operational systems, and other computing services within an organization, usually to the exclusion of access by outsiders. The term is used in c ...

or the

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, p ...

. The protocol thus interconnects multiple platforms. Some wire protocols are language-independent, allowing the communication of programs written in different

programming language A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Most programming languages are text-based formal languages, but they may also be graphical. They are a kind of computer language. The description of a programming ...

s. Examples of wire protocols include: *

IIOP In distributed computing, General Inter-ORB Protocol (GIOP) is the message protocol by which object request brokers (ORBs) communicate in CORBA. Standards associated with the protocol are maintained by the Object Management Group (OMG). The curre ...

for

CORBA The Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) is a standard defined by the Object Management Group (OMG) designed to facilitate the communication of systems that are deployed on diverse platforms. CORBA enables collaboration between s ...

* RTPS for DDS * Java Debug Wire Protocol (

JDWP In computing, the Java Debug Wire Protocol (JDWP) is a communication protocol which is part of the Java Platform Debugger Architecture. It is used for communication between a debugger and the Java Virtual Machine, which it debugs. It allows to de ...

) for Java debugging * JRMP for RMI *

SOAP Soap is a salt of a fatty acid used in a variety of cleansing and lubricating products. In a domestic setting, soaps are surfactants usually used for washing, bathing, and other types of housekeeping. In industrial settings, soaps are us ...

for Web services *

AMQP The Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) is an open standard application layer protocol for message-oriented middleware. The defining features of AMQP are message orientation, queuing, routing (including point-to-point and publish-and-subsc ...

for

message-oriented middleware Message-oriented middleware (MOM) is software or hardware infrastructure supporting sending and receiving messages between distributed systems. MOM allows application modules to be distributed over heterogeneous platforms and reduces the comple ...

PostgreSQL wire protocol

References

Application layer protocols {{Compu-network-stub

Functionality

Types

See also

References