Best practices: What's the best way to treat byte protocol

Question

I have a serial communication with a device that has its own protocol, in other words, it has some byte arrays (frames) with some meaning. So, I have been treating it with a lot of default frames in a map to send data to the device and a kind of state machine, a big switch-case block to receive data from the device.

I know this question is subjective but I really would like to receive best practices to implement this relationship. Maybe there are design patterns to do the same.

Answer 1

It all depends on how complex it is. If it's something as hairy as 3270 you certainly need a state machine. If it's a simple byte protocol you don't need anything more complex than a DataInputStream. There's not enough information here to say which.