TCP/UDP Communication in Java

6.7 Summary

As mentioned in Chapter 5, the BSD Internet domain sockets use the TCP/IP (or UDP/IP) protocol suite as the communication protocols among processes. TCP is a connection-oriented protocol and it implements a connection as a stream of bytes from source to destination, while UDP is a connectionless transport protocol and uses datagrams to implement its communication. In this chapter we discussed the datagrams for the TCP/UDP communications. Java provides the reliable stream-based communication for TCP as well as the unreliable datagram communication for UDP. The stream-based communication is like a telephone system which has the connection built first, whereas datagram communication is like a mail system which has no fixed connection. Java various input/output streams allow application programs to input and output various data, such as bytes, string, file etc. The Java socket API provides the basis of TCP/UDP communication. Various examples presented in the chapter have been a great help for readers in writing Java TCP/UDP programs of their own.