Is the nature of this process an actual, meaningful conversation? In other
words, the foreign host sends your 3000 some ASCII message as input, your
3000 processes this message, and returns processed output, like EDI
transactions?

Or, is your 3000 replying, yes, I got message #123,456, here's your checksum
(or whatever) to confirm that I really, truly got it? If the latter, it
sounds like a poorly defined process, since TCP/IP pretty much already does
all of that for you, and it sounds like someone at the remote end is
reinventing all four wheels and most of the Model-T. As Wirt and Wayne
wrote, you have to be careful about who is allowed to drive the details of
implementation.

If the former, there are a whole bunch of ways to do this. What language do
you like, or would like to use? COBOL or any other 3GL and NetIPC does this
beautifully, as do the other 3GLs with Berkeley sockets, as does perl and
its own socket handling routines. For really small files or amounts of text,
there is TFTP, which is UDP-based.

Greg Stigers
http://www.cgiusa.com

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