# Designing a client/server protocol in XML

Occasionally, people try to define a custom protocol that allows multiple XML requests/responses to be sent over a single transport channel. This section discusses the non-trivial interaction between XML and sockets, and how you can design a protocol correctly.

XML1.0 requires a conforming parser to read the entire data till end of the stream (because a parser needs to handle documents like `<root/><!-- post root comment -->`). As a result, a naive attempt to keep one `OutputStream` open and marshal objects multiple times fails.

One easy way to work around this limitation is to design your protocol so that the data on the wire will look like the following:

    <conversation>
      <!-- message 1 -->
      <message>
        ...
      </message>

      <!-- message 2 -->
      <message>
        ...
      </message>

      ...
    </conversation>

The `<conversation>` start tag is sent immediately after the socket is opened. This works as a container to send multiple "messages", and this is also an excellent opportunity to do the hand-shaking (e.g., `protocol-version='1.0'` attribute.) Once the `<conversation>` tag is written, multiple messages can be marshalled as a tree into the channel, possibly with a large time lag in between. You can use the JAXB marshaller to produce such message. When the sender wants to disconnect the channel, it can do so by sending the `</conversation>` end tag, followed by the socket disconnection.

Of course, you can choose any tag names freely, and each message can have different tag names.

The receiver would use the StAX API and use `XMLStreamReader` to read this stream. You'd have to use this to process the first `<conversation>` start tag. After that, every time you call a JAXB unmarshaller, you'll get the next message.

For the concrete code, see the `xml-channel` example in the JAXB RI distribution.