TOC protocol

The TOC protocol is an obsolete protocol that was used as a wrapper for the OSCAR protocol. It was used primarily by providers AOL Instant Messenger, sometimes including AOL itself on August 19, 2005 AOL ceased to support and no longer used it ever since in his clients. AOL published the specification to promote open- source projects. Among others, it also developed its own clients, such as TiK and TAC.

TOC is an ASCII -based protocol, in contrast to OSCAR, which is binary. It has far fewer features than OSCAR. Among other missing buddy icons, file transfers and the possibility to integrate advertising.

In principle, one can see a TOC OSCAR server as client, translates the message and passes. TOC uses as well OSCAR FLAP. The server can operate in HTTP mode (port 80 ) so that one can not distinguish it from a normal web server. The reason is that FLAP has been hacked and can run on port 80. When a client connects, it sends an HTTP request instead of the string " FLAPON " followed by two newlines, and the server will accept from then on FLAP messages. Once the user profile is loaded, the server waits for a new connection is established the client, who can then access a normal HTTP server that has the user profile saved as HTML.

In FLAP are two different messaging systems. Client-to- server message had a format that the Unix command line similar to: commands with arguments that are separated by white space, backslash or escape character. Server-to- client messages were constructed even easier: ASCII strings that are separated by a colon, as is known from Unix configuration files. Therefore, it was relatively easy to read and send messages.

TOC2

The TOC2 protocol is a revised version of "Talk to OSCAR " protocol. It was never documented by AOL and is only used in some AOL Instant Messenger client. In contrast to his predecessor TOC2 is still supported by AOL, so that many other clients have switched to TOC2. Like its predecessors, TOC2 an ASCII protocol, and can feature a number of OSCAR on the sidelines, including file transfers, and buddy icons.