Network Protocol

This page documents the types of messages that the client and server can exchange. For the actual network connection see wiki/Network and for the encoding and compression of the messages see wiki/PacketEncoding.

• General packets that flow in both direction:

Packet Type	Arguments	Purpose	Actions Required
hello	a dictionary containing connection options and capabilities	authentication (if required), setup of keyboard, configuration options, etc	either accept the connection and send a hello back as acknowledgement, send a challenge request or disconnect
ping	time to be echoed back	monitor connection state, collect latency statistics	The receiver must send a ping-echo back
ping-echo	echoed time, load average, measured latency	response to ping	none, it should be used to collect latency statistics
sound-data	sound buffers and associated metadata	forward sound data	the receiver should queue the sound buffer, it may drop them if desired - if so, it should tell the other end to stop sending
connection-lost	none	sent by the network layer when the network connection has dropped	free any resources
gibberish	none	sent by the network layer when the network received unparseable data, data decompression failed or decryption failed	disconnect the connection and free any resources

• Packets sent by the server

Packet Type	Arguments	Purpose	Actions Required	Client Capability Required
startup-complete	none	notifies the client that all the windows have been sent	none	notify-startup-complete
new-window and new-override-redirect	many	tells the client about a new regular window or override-redirect window	the client should show the new window, it should eventually send a map-window packet with the location of the window	none
new-tray	many	tells the client about a new tray window	the client should show the new system tray	system_tray
raise-window	window ID	the window should be raised	the client may or may not honour the request to raise the window	window.raise