RE: A generic control/message passing protocol I encourage you all to have a look at Open Sound Control (OSC). OSC was designed to be simple to parse yet sufficiently verbose to provide a complete namespace and type system. OSC is stateless and designed with realtime music applications in mind, especially for control data and inter-application communication.
http://cnmat.cnmat.berkeley.edu/OSC/ A typical use of OSC is to control a synthesizer from another application by sending a message such as "/mypatch/oscillator3/frequency 440". The most common method of transmission is as a UDP packet, but other methods are possible. -andy --- Andrew W. Schmeder
