The speed and convenience of messaging has given rise to a multitude of messaging and transport protocols for supporting different types of data and messaging. Messaging and transport protocols are used to define standards by which content is communicated and processed. For example, a message protocol used by financial companies and institutions may define a specific data structure for effective storage and representation of stock prices and market data. In another example, a transport protocol may classify interactions into one or more predefined categories so that communications may be standardized between a receiving device and a sending device. As such, applications and other programs that receive data from various sources must be specifically configured to process and understand a data transmission formatted according to a particular messaging protocol. As can be imagined, an application may be required to possess several functions and/or programs so that the application may handle communications and data from multiple sources, wherein each source uses different transport and/or messaging protocols.
Further, in many instances, requested data and/or content might not translate or convert easily (or at all) into a format specified by a messaging or transport protocol. Thus, some portions of the data and/or content may be excluded from the message transmission so that the transmission may conform to the messaging and/or transport specifications. Specifically, some transport protocols might only accept certain types and/or formats of content. In financial transaction systems, for example, a messaging protocol might only define two fields for a message structure, stock symbol and stock price. Thus, a consumer company and/or user might not be able to also convey transaction volume data in a message using such a messaging protocol.
For the foregoing reasons, an extensible messaging model for handling a variety of data types and formats is needed.