Doing a little research on the two to figure out which one may better suit my purposes (communications amongst different hardware).

How do they fare against one another? Im far from being a specialist and have no idea where I would even start looking for data to compare and contrast. If possible can someone please answer the following questions in regards to each of these.

1. Can they be networked amongst each other?
2. Can they be easily networked over ethernet?
3. What speeds do they transfer at? (Min, Max, Etc.)
4. Reliability?
5. Best framework to build on top of to support the above?
6. Any standard communications programs?
7. Debugging capability?

Any help would be very much appreciated, thanks.