There’s
actually a lot more to networking than can be covered in this introductory
treatment. Java networking also provides fairly extensive support for URLs,
including protocol handlers for different types of content that can be
discovered at an Internet site.
In
addition, an up-and-coming technology is the Servlet
Server
,
which is an Internet server that uses Java to handle requests instead of the
slow and rather awkward CGI (Common Gateway Interface) protocol. This means
that to provide services on the server side you’ll be able to write in
Java instead of using some other language that you might not know as well.
You’ll also get the portability benefits of Java so you won’t have
to worry about the particular platform the server is hosted on.
These
and other features are fully and carefully described in
Java
Network Programming
by Elliotte Rusty Harold (O’Reilly, 1997).