What is the difference between a port and a socket?

Question

This was a question raised by one of the software engineers in my organisation. I\'m interested in the broadest definition.

Answer 1

Generally, you will get a lot of theoretical but one of the easiest ways to differentiate these two concepts is as follows:

In order to get a service, you need a service number. This service number is called a port. Simple as that.

For example, the HTTP as a service is running on port 80.

Now, many people can request the service and a connection from client-server has established. There will be a lot of connections. Each connection represent a client. In order to maintain each connection, the server creates a socket per connection to maintain its client.