Coming from a windows development background I am mostly familiar with windows socket communication for communicating data between different machines in a TCP/IP environment. However, I am going to be starting on a dev project soon which will require a more robust communications method, between a high volume server in a unix environment (either solaris or IRIX) and potential client applications on both UNIX and windows environments. Essentially I need to be able to transfer small packets of binary data (not files) to relay queries (the server acts similarly to a database) and return query results. Additionally, the ability to encrypt packets would be useful, and the ability to process multiple incoming connections at a time is crucial. At worst I'm expecting to have to develop a custom communications protocol, but if anyone is aware of an existing standard or SDK that can deal with this type of communications, I would appreciate information about it, or a reference to a source of information about it ;). Finally, what is a good reference guide for more information about the issues I will encounter in writing a communications system which can deal with a potentially high volume of multiple connections from several different host systems? Thanks greatly
-Sean