Socket Protocol Fundamentals

Question

Recently, while reading a Socket Programming HOWTO the following section jumped out at me:

But if you plan to reuse your socket for further transfers,

Answer 1

If you're designing your own protocol then look at other people's work first; there might already be something similar out there that you could either use 'as is' or repurpose and adjust. For example; ISO-8583 for financial txns, HTTP or POP3 all do things differently but in ways that are proven to work... In fact it's worth looking at these things anyway as you'll learn a lot about how real world protocols are put together.

If you need to write your own protocol then, IMHO, prefer length prefixed messages where possible. They're easy and efficient to parse for the receiver but possibly harder to generate if it is costly to determine the length of the data before you begin sending it.