 - Sockets is a method for communication between a client program and a server program in a network. A socket is defined as "the endpoint in a connection." Sockets are created and used with a set of programming requests or "function calls" sometimes called the sockets application programming interface (API). The most common sockets API is the Berkeley Unix C interface for sockets. Sockets can also be used for communication between processes within the same computer.
This is the typical sequence of sockets requests from a server application in the "connectionless" context of the Internet in which a server handles many client requests and does not maintain a connection longer than the serving of the immediate request:
socket()
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bind()
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recvfrom()
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(wait for a sendto request from some client)
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(process the sendto request)
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sendto (in reply to the request from the client...for example, send an HTML file)
A corresponding client sequence of sockets requests would be:
socket()
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bind()
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sendto()
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recvfrom()
Sockets can also be used for "connection-oriented" transactions with a somewhat different sequence of C language system calls or functions.
| CONTRIBUTORS: |
John Harschutz |
| LAST UPDATED: |
31 Jul 2001
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