In computer networking, a wire protocol refers to a way of getting data

Data

The term data refers to qualitative or quantitative attributes of a variable or set of variables. Data are typically the results of measurements and can be the basis of graphs, images, or observations of a set of variables. Data are often viewed as the lowest level of abstraction from which...

 from point to point: A wire protocol is needed if more than one application has to interoperate. In contrast to transport protocols at the transport level (like TCP

Transmission Control Protocol

The Transmission Control Protocol is one of the core protocols of the Internet Protocol Suite. TCP is one of the two original components of the suite, complementing the Internet Protocol , and therefore the entire suite is commonly referred to as TCP/IP...

 or UDP

User Datagram Protocol

The User Datagram Protocol is one of the core members of the Internet Protocol Suite, the set of network protocols used for the Internet. With UDP, computer applications can send messages, in this case referred to as datagrams, to other hosts on an Internet Protocol network without requiring...

), 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 (XML

XML

Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....

) and a data binding (using e.g. a common encoding scheme like XSD).

In electronics

Electronics

Electronics is the branch of science, engineering and technology that deals with electrical circuits involving active electrical components such as vacuum tubes, transistors, diodes and integrated circuits, and associated passive interconnection technologies...

, 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 give the means for a program running via one operating system to communicate with a program running under some other operating system using the Internet and are used to interconnect multiple platforms. Some are language-independent, allowing the communication of programs written in different languages.

Examples of wire protocols are

• IIOP for CORBA
  Çorba
  Chorba , ciorbă , shurpa , shorpo , or sorpa is one of various kinds of soup or stew found in national cuisines across Middle East...
  
  
• JRMP for RMI
  Java remote method invocation
  The Java Remote Method Invocation Application Programming Interface , or Java RMI, is a Java application programming interface that performs the object-oriented equivalent of remote procedure calls ....
  
  
• SOAP
  SOAP
  SOAP, originally defined as Simple Object Access Protocol, is a protocol specification for exchanging structured information in the implementation of Web Services in computer networks...
  
   for Web Services

See also

• communications protocol
  Communications protocol
  A communications protocol is a system of digital message formats and rules for exchanging those messages in or between computing systems and in telecommunications...
  
  
• line code
  Line code
  In telecommunication, a line code is a code chosen for use within a communications system for baseband transmission purposes...
  
  
• network protocol