Chapter 5. Networking
Sun Microsystems
has long used the slogan "The Network Is The
Computer." It's no surprise,
therefore, that they designed Java to be a network-centric language.
The java.net package provides powerful and
easy-to-use networking capabilities. The examples in this chapter
demonstrate those capabilities at a number of different levels of
abstraction. They show you how to:
- Use the URL class to
parse URLs and download the network resources specified by a URL - Use the URLConnection
class to gain more control over the downloading of network resources - Write client programs that use the
Socket class to communicate over the network - Use the Socket and
ServerSocket classes to write servers - Send and receive low-overhead datagram packets
Java 1.4 introduced the New I/O API of java.nio
and its subpackages. This new API is channel-based instead of
stream-based, and can be used for local file I/O as well as network
I/O. java.nio is particularly suited to
high-performance servers, and does not make the
java.net package obsolete. The New I/O API is
covered in Chapter 6.