I need this for my school project. I have to write an Client/Server application that should act as a Chat (with rooms, user groups and such stuff) and I read through the code guru articles refering to network programing, such as this:
http://www.codeguru.com/forum/showthread.php?t=306399

There are now two ways for me to introduce the internal chat server protocol:

* I use plain text commands
or
* I use the package scheme.

I prefer the second solution but:
My question now is, if I introduce this packet scheme in my C++ written server, can a Java or a Delphi written client understand these packages? If yes what do I have to consider? Or should I write an C++ layer (a dll for example) that lies under the Client itself, and the client is just using these functions?

Any tip or help would be very appreciated.
Thanks in advance
Florian