This initial specification contains only seven commands, enough only to address the requirements stated above. However, the protocol has been designed with expansion in mind. If the initial implementation is successful and becomes popular at the correlators it is inevitable that further capabilities will be desired. It is envisioned that at some point the Web-Track and original Track software could be converted to use this interface making it the only interface to the database. This would remove the redundant codes from those programs.
Responses consist of a status indicator and a keyword possibly followed by additional information.
All responses are terminated by a CRLF pair. Responses to certain commands are multi-line. In these cases, after sending the first line of the response and a CRLF, any additional lines are sent, each terminated by a CRLF pair. If any line of the multi-line response begins with the termination character, the line is prefixed with an additional termination character. When examining a multi-line response, the client checks to see if the line begins with the termination character.