In computer networking, a wire protocol refers to a way of getting data from point to point: A wire protocol is needed if more than one application has to interoperate. It generally refers to protocols higher than the physical layer. In contrast to transport protocols at the transport level (like TCP or UDP), the term "wire protocol" is used to describe a common way to represent information at the application level. It refers only to a common application layer protocol and not to a common object semantic of the applications. Such a representation at application level needs a common infoset (e.g. XML) and a data binding (using e.g. a common encoding scheme like XSD).
Contents
The wire protocol may be either text-based or a binary protocol. Although an important architectural decision, this is a separate matter from the distinction between wire protocols and programmatic APIs.
In electronics, a wire protocol is the mechanism used to transmit data from one point to another.
Functionality
A wire protocol provides the means for 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 using the Internet - they interconnect multiple platforms. Some are language-independent, allowing the communication of programs written in different languages.
Examples of wire protocols include: