258. Introducing socket basics

The socket notion was introduced in the ‘80s. This notion was introduced on Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) (a Unix flavor) as a solution for network communication between processes via Internet Protocol (IP). Java introduced its first cross-platform API for sockets in 1996 (JDK 1.0). As you’ll see soon, with just a few notions such as network interface, IP address and port, a Java developer can write applications that communicate via sockets.

At the IP level, data travels from source to destination in chunks (packets) of data. Each packet is seen as an individual entity and there is no guarantee that all packets sent from a source will hit the destination. Nevertheless, on top of IP, we have other protocols that are more popular such as Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and User Datagram Protocol (UDP). Moreover, on top of these protocols, we have the well-known HTTP, DNS, Telnet, and so on. Machine communication via sockets...