FFWD has with a protobuf-based protocol that supports most of the features available in the system.
This protocol is provided by the ffwd-protobuf plugin.
The protocol frames messages as UDP datagrams.
Each message is a frame prefixed with the version and the length of the entire frame.
| version | length | data |
| 4 | 4 | * |
The version field designates which version of the protocol is in use. This determines the structure of the data field.
The length field designates how long the entire frame is supposed to be, since UDP can crop the message this is used for detecting buffer underruns.
Messages encaupsulated in the data field are serialized according to the protobuf standard.
The following lists the currently available versions and their protobuf definitions.