difference between socket programming and Http programming

by

HTTP is an application protocol. It basically means that HTTP itself can’t be used to transport information to/from a remote end point. Instead it relies on an underlying protocol which in HTTP’s case is TCP.

enter image description here

You can read more about OSI layers if you are interested.

Sockets on the other hand are an API that most operating systems provide to be able to talk with the network. The socket API supports different protocols from the transport layer and down.

That means that if you would like to use TCP you use sockets. But you can also use sockets to communicate using HTTP, but then you have to decode/encode messages according to the HTTP specification (RFC2616). Since that can be a huge task for most developers we also got ready clients in our developer frameworks (like .NET), for instance the WebClient or the HttpWebRequest classes.

More Related Contents:

  1. What do you use when you need reliable UDP?
  2. TCP: can two different sockets share a port?
  3. What does “connection reset by peer” mean?
  4. When is TCP option SO_LINGER (0) required?
  5. What is the difference between 127.0.0.1 and localhost
  6. Why is it impossible, without attempting I/O, to detect that TCP socket was gracefully closed by peer?
  7. What does it mean to bind a multicast (UDP) socket?
  8. Send and Receive a file in socket programming in Linux with C/C++ (GCC/G++)
  9. Setting the source IP for a UDP socket
  10. Difference between socket and websocket?
  11. Differences between TCP sockets and web sockets, one more time [duplicate]
  12. Do I need to heartbeat to keep a TCP connection open?
  13. Send HTTP request manually via socket
  14. Chrome hangs after certain amount of data transfered – waiting for available socket
  15. Python Socket Multiple Clients
  16. socket connect() vs bind()
  17. socket.emit() vs. socket.send()
  18. Can TCP and UDP sockets use the same port?
  19. How do you throttle the bandwidth of a socket connection in C?
  20. socket.io: Failed to load resource
  21. C# An established connection was aborted by the software in your host machine
  22. What are SO_SNDBUF and SO_RCVBUF
  23. How to exit a blocking recv() call? [duplicate]
  24. Sending and receiving files on socket
  25. What is “backlog” in TCP connections?
  26. How does a socket know which network interface controller to use?
  27. Spurious readiness notification for Select System call
  28. Run a web socket on Cloud Functions for Firebase?
  29. What’s the difference between WebSocket and plain socket communication?
  30. Maximum number of concurrent connections on a single port (socket) of Server

Leave a Comment