Thread: Networking Protocols

I understand different networking applications use different protocols, I was wondering if different protocols have different syntax a person needs to learn and if so is this syntax independent of any specific programming language?

I want to learn more about networking alongside continue learning Java, I've been through the oracle networking tutorial and not sure what else I can do.

In theory you would need to learn the way the protocol is designed but it's not some kind of a programming language but more a design of how a stream of bytes is transmitted. For example:
1. Byte MessageType
2-3. Byte MessageId
4-8. Byte MessageLength
8-... Byte PlayerName

The way the bytes are send in a bytestream are the so called "Protocol". Most protocols are defined in RFCs (Request for comments) which are freely available but there are a lot of closed source protocols used by different applications / companies.

Thank you, I suppose it has as much to do with Java or any other language as a router or any other independent subject. I've learnt to use networking in small program's like a chat client & server with UDP and TCP, and used robot class.
What other projects and subjects do you think I should check out as I seek to learn more in networking besides doing bigger projects with what I already know.
Networking is very interesting.

Well that's a good question. Depends on what you want to do. You could do some simple Games like Pong for 2 Players on different PCs but that is not only networking but some "game programing" too. On the other side you could try to send a few simple objects around by either using ObjectOutput/InputStream (the easy but heavy overhead way) or using interfaces like Externalizable where you have to write / read the bytestream yourself. At last there are frameworks out there to easy the step of lightweight / fast the bytestream by sourcecode / bytecode generation using a special structure syntax like Google Protobuf, Apache Thrift, Apache Avro.

If you need more information on one or other topics feel free to ask

I'm going to either try peer to peer file sharing, a card game or look into IRC. I want to try something new hence the choices. Thank you for your help.

Good luck