Sending Messages in a TCP Stream

Question

TCP is stream-based, which means you send bytes without them necessarily being in a \"message\", so the receiver may get half a message or one and two thirds of messages.

Answer 1

You could implement your own ACK-based protocol over UDP. Prepend the message with a message/sequence number on the sending side and echo that number back to the sender on the receiving side. Start a timer on the sending side for each message and cancel it when you get the corresponding ACK back. If the timer pops, re-send the message.

XMPP is way, way too heavy for this application.