Connect two client sockets

Question

Let\'s say Java has two kind of sockets:

• server sockets \"ServerSocket\"
• client sockets or just \"Socket\"

Imagine the situation of two

Answer 1

Generally speaking, a client TCP socket has two ends (local and “remote”) and a server TCP socket has one end (because it is waiting for a client to connect to it). When a client connects to the server, the server internally spawns a client socket to form connected pair of client sockets that represent the communications channel; it's a pair because each socket views the channel from one end. This is How TCP Works (at a high level).

You can't have two client sockets connect to each other in TCP, as the low-level connection protocol doesn't work that way. (You can have a connected pair of sockets created that way in Unix, but it's not exposed in Java and they're not TCP sockets.) What you can do is close the server socket once you've accepted a connection; for simple cases, that might be good enough.

UDP sockets are different, of course, but they work with datagrams and not streams. That's a very different model of communication.