IMPLEMENTING COMMUNICATION PROTOCOLS IN JAVA

As the number and variety of Web- and network-based applications conti nues to increase, so does the need for flexible communication protocol s and services to support them. Traditionally, a major impediment to d eployment of new protocols and services is the need to upgrade million s of end systems with compatible implementations. At the same time, Ja va - a language explicitly designed to support development and distrib ution of new applications via the Web - is emerging as a (potentially) ubiquitous system platform. It is therefore natural to consider wheth er Java might speed the introduction of protocols to better support ne w applications. In this article we discuss the suitability of Java as an environment for implementing and deploying communication protocols. Using insights from a Java-based protocol suite and supporting protoc ol subsystem we have implemented, we describe the benefits of using Ja va for protocol development and deployment, and how protocol programme rs can implement protocols taking advantage of those benefits.