Low level – of sockets and servers

QTcpSocket and QTcpServer are two classes for sockets used in Qt. They work in much the same way as your web browser and a WWW server. These connect to a network address host, whereas QLocalSocket and QLocalServer connect to a local file descriptor.

Let's look at QLocalServer and QLocalSocket first.

In socket server programming, the basic procedure is as follows:

1. Create a socket
2. Set socket options
3. Bind a socket address
4. Listen for connections
5. Accept new connection

Qt simplifies these steps to the following:

1. Create a socket
2. Listen for connections
3. Accept new connection

QLocalServer

If you need communication on the same machine, then QLocalServer will be slightly more performant...