What is TOC ?

hie friends,

What do you mean by TOC ? n How it is related to AOL service ?
Does anyone know information about TOC, then please share your ideas....

thnx

The TOC ( Talk to OSCAR ) protocol, was a protocol used by some third-party AOL Instant Messenger clients and several clients that AOL produced itself.

Sometime near August 19, 2005, AOL discontinued support for the protocol and no longer uses it in any of the instant messaging clients it actively maintains, such as its Windows and Mac clients for the AOL Instant Messenger and ICQ systems.

AOL also provided the TOC protocol specification openly to developers in the hopes that they will use it instead of the proprietary OSCAR protocol they use themselves.
The TOC2 protocol is still supported.

I will tell you about - How Does TOC Work ?

-- TOC acted as a wrapper for the OSCAR protocol.
Upon login, the TOC client specified an OSCAR login server (presumably either login.oscar.aol.com or login.icq.com) that the TOC server used on behalf of the client.

TOC used FLAP to encapsulate its messages just as OSCAR does, however, FLAP has been hacked in such a way that it can be implemented on the same port as an HTTP server. By default, the TOC server operated in HTTP mode, indistinguishable from a typical web server.

If a connecting client, in place of an HTTP request, writes the string "FLAPON" followed by two CRLFs, TOC would switch gears and start reading FLAP messages. Upon getting a user's profile, the client was expected to re-connect to TOC and use it as an HTTP server, which would host the user's profile in HTML.

Once connected, two basic message formats for communications inside of FLAP existed. Client-to-server messages were sent in a format resembling a Unix-style command line: commands with whitespace-separated arguments, quoting and backslash escape sequences. Server-to-client messages were much simpler: they were sent as colon-separated ASCII strings, in a manner similar to many Unix config files. Thus, it was quite easy to write a client, as the incoming messages were very easy to parse, and outgoing commands were easy to generate.