So the communication protocol in Janthus (http://www.janthus.com) is basically a custom solution, transmitting a simple text protocol over TCP. I wonder if I basically re-invented the wheel on this one. I've mused about using XMPP (Openfire, see http://www.igniterealtime.org), most of it written by one of my excellent colleagues over at Jive Software. One of the reasons I didn't go there was my (probably) irrational fear of the overhead of parsing xml streams. Also I was pretty sure that traffic to the server would not merit an ultraefficient communication protocol at first, a thought which has so far proved correct, as no more than 2 people log on every few hours or so right now. It would be an awesome problem to have, if I begin to have problems of scale Openfire would probably be my next stop, and perhaps the most logical one, as Janthus is design pretty much like a gigantic chat room at the moment, a shoo-in for the aforementioned technology.