In this article we've seen how we can use PHP and its various socket functions to contact our SARP server and send it commands to both add and retrieve data to and from its Access database. The main purpose of this article however was to show you that it isn’t too difficult to create your own custom protocol that sits on top of the TCP/IP protocol.
With a little bit of creativity and a couple of pages of code, you could easily create a protocol that you could use to allow remote computers to communicate with your proprietary data formats that reside on your server.
I myself will be creating a protocol called XProt, which will be based entirely on XML. The protocol will contain around 30 commands that people can use to retrieve the details of the content posted on devArticles. One of the commands will allow anyone to specify a series of article id's separated by commas, have those articles zipped on the Xprot server, and either stream that zip file to them, or send it to them via email.
Remember that most protocols are plain text, and implementing your own protocol is a great way to share your content with others.
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