A socket is a basic component for developing communications applications and serves as a communications endpoint. A socket can be assigned a name via which it can then be accessed and addressed.
Each socket has a specific type and belongs to a task. More than one socket may be associated with the same task.
A socket belongs to a specific communications domain. Address and protocol families are collected together into a communications domain. An address family comprises addresses with the same address structure. A protocol family defines a set of protocols which implement the socket types in the domain. Communications domains are used to group the common characteristics of tasks that communicate via sockets. The socket interface in BS2000 supports the Internet communications domains AF_INET and AF_INET6, as well as the ISO communications domain AF_ISO.
There are various socket types with different communications characteristics. Two different socket types are currently supported:
stream sockets
datagram sockets
raw sockets