All about Sockets
[PENDING: intro material here, talk some about client/server model.
draw a picture]
A socket is one end of a two-way communications link between two
programs running on the network. Sockets are used to implement the
connection between a client program and a server program. The java.net
package provides two classes--Socket and ServerSocket--that implement the
client side of the connection and the server side of the connection,
respectively.
This page contains a small example that illustrates how a client program
can read from and write to a socket.
The previous page showed an example of how to write a client program
that interacted with an existing server via a Socket object. This
page will show you how to write a program that implements the other
side of the connection--a server program.
Advanced Sockets
[PENDING: This section could cover:
providing your own socket implementation (covers Socket.setSocketImplFactory(),
ServerSocket.setSocketFactory(), the SocketImplFactory interface, and the SocketImpl class)]
The InetAddress Class
[PENDING: this section would talk about the InetAddress class and the getInetAddress() methods.]