9. The method of claim 5 wherein said at least one set of wire format specific derived classes includes a default message characteristics class defining default message characteristics that are applicable to messages or message components associated with a corresponding wire format in absence of overriding settings.
12. The method of claim 9 wherein said default message characteristics include at least one of a default message identifier, a default byte order, a default floating point number format, a default byte alignment, a default boolean true value, a default boolean false value, a default boolean null value, a default date format, a default time format, a default compression technique, a default tag length, and a default delimiter.