Interacting with sockets

First of all, in order to go deeper in to network programming, we need to understand how computers communicate with each other. This is the technological base that everyone should know before trying to do anything with networking.

This topic is not simple by itself, but it can be approached more easily without the need to understand the deeper concepts, with the help of SFML's socket classes.

A socket is essentially a gateway for data. You can visualize it as a link between two applications. These applications are virtual, in the sense, they only matter in the network, but are not necessarily different application processes, because you can use sockets to connect an application to itself, as we do in this chapter. These sockets are the base of all networked programs; therefore, they are extremely important. As sockets are a rather complicated concept, SFML provides classes to manage them.

There are the following two main ways of communicating between multiple machines...