OX messages

An OX message for TCP/IP is a byte stream consisting of a header and a body.

Header

Body

The header consists of two signed 32 bit integers. The first one is an OX tag and the second one is a serial number of the OX message.Several byte orders including the network byte order are allowed and the byte order is determined as a part of the establishment of a connection. See Section 5 for details.

The OX messages are classified into three types: DATA, COMMAND, and SPECIAL. We have currently the following general tags for the OX messages.

#define	OX_COMMAND               513  // COMMAND
#define	OX_DATA	                 514  // DATA
#define OX_SYNC_BALL             515  // SPECIAL
#define OX_DATA_WITH_LENGTH      521  // DATA
#define OX_DATA_OPENMATH_XML     523  // DATA
#define OX_DATA_OPENMATH_BINARY  524  // DATA
#define OX_DATA_MP               525  // DATA

A new OX tag may be added. The new tag should be classified into DATA or COMMAND. For example, OX_DATA_ASIR_LOCAL_BINARY was added recently to send internal serialized objects of Asir via the OpenXM protocol for efficiency reason. This is a tag classified to DATA. See the web page of OpenXM to add a new tag [15].