Most typically, file exchange occurs as a background activity. SMTP and MIME E-mail systems and their related standards are another option. While many e-mail systems support SMTP today, not all of them are interoperable. Other Approaches Sockets Sockets are a data streaming protocol. More flexible and primitive than other approaches, sockets require tight agreement among implementations concerning the control flow, recovery, segmenting, and other strategies to be used.
Sockets are available on all computing platforms.
Standards for messaging products are extremely primitive. For this reason, implementations using message-oriented middleware usually have to agree on a vendor to use in common. CPFR is currently defined in terms of data to be transmitted, rather than object interactions. As a result, IIOP requires implementations to take the extra step of mapping CPFR messages to objects. Future revisions of the CPFR specification may introduce a distributed object model that could be used more effectively with this approach.