I am part of a team working on something that is not a "code project". I am actually asking these questions with two goals in mind.

1) One of my responsibilities is to have small ASAP microcontroller boards with sensors and status lines communicating back to an admin app over ethernet. I don't have final specs yet, but I think that UDP is a requirement placed upon me (thus, no TCP/IP). This will probably be binary data and thus "line operations" that sense "end of line" are probably not an option. That is probably the limit of what I can say about goal #1.

2) The other goal is to be able to pump and verify many channels of ethernet traffic during testing. I am probably free to use UDP or TCP/IP, and I probably am free to use binary data or ASCII data terminated by CR, LF. I do need to be very confident that I am in control of what data is being sent through each RJ-45.

The chat application at a "Hello World" level is just to get me started. Developing the code to deal with empty buffers, full buffers, fragmented packets, lost packets, etc should be quite a task by itself. I would like to do as much work as possible in an Intel Architecture to Intel Architecture environment before I put "under development" hardware and "under development" software at the other end of the wire.

Thank you,
Bruce