这是我所在组织的一位软件工程师提出的问题。我感兴趣的是最广义的定义。


当前回答

从Oracle Java教程:

套接字是网络上运行的两个程序之间双向通信链路的一个端点。套接字与端口号绑定,以便TCP层可以识别数据要发送到的应用程序。

其他回答

A socket is a communication endpoint. A socket is not directly related to the TCP/IP protocol family, it can be used with any protocol your system supports. The C socket API expects you to first get a blank socket object from the system that you can then either bind to a local socket address (to directly retrieve incoming traffic for connection-less protocols or to accept incoming connection requests for connection-oriented protocols) or that you can connect to a remote socket address (for either kind of protocol). You can even do both if you want to control both, the local socket address a socket is bound to and the remote socket address a socket is connected to. For connection-less protocols connecting a socket is even optional but if you don't do that, you'll have to also pass the destination address with every packet you want to send over the socket as how else would the socket know where to send this data to? Advantage is that you can use a single socket to send packets to different socket addresses. Once you have your socket configured and maybe even connected, consider it to be a bi-directional communication pipe. You can use it to pass data to some destination and some destination can use it to pass data back to you. What you write to a socket is send out and what has been received is available for reading.

Ports on the other hand are something that only certain protocols of the TCP/IP protocol stack have. TCP and UDP packets have ports. A port is just a simple number. The combination of source port and destination port identify a communication channel between two hosts. E.g. you may have a server that shall be both, a simple HTTP server and a simple FTP server. If now a packet arrives for the address of that server, how would it know if that is a packet for the HTTP or the FTP server? Well, it will know so as the HTTP server will run on port 80 and the FTP server on port 21, so if the packet arrives with a destination port 80, it is for the HTTP server and not for the FTP server. Also the packet has a source port since without such a source port, a server could only have one connection to one IP address at a time. The source port makes it possible for a server to distinguish otherwise identical connections: they all have the same destination port, e.g. port 80, the same destination IP (the IP of the server), and the same source IP, as they all come from the same client, but as they have different source ports, the server can distinguish them from each other. And when the server sends back replies, it will do so to the port the request came from, that way the client can also distinguish different replies it receives from the same server.

I know that there are lot of explanations. But, there is one more easy way to understand with practical example. We all can connect to HTTP port 80, but does it mean only one user can connect to that port at a time?. The answer is obviously 'no'. Multiple users for multiple purposes can access HTTP port 80 but they still get proper response they are waiting for, from the server, can't they?. Now think about it for a minute, how?. Yes you are correct, its IP address that uniquely identifies different users who contacts for different purposes. If you would have read the previous answers before reaching here, you would know that IP address is a part of information that socket consists. Think about it, is it possible to have a communication without sockets?. The answer is 'Yes' but you cannot run more than one application in a port but we know that we are not a 'Dump' switch that runs on just hardware.

它们是来自两个不同领域的术语:“端口”是TCP/IP网络的概念,“套接字”是API(编程)的东西。“套接字”是通过将端口和主机名或网络适配器组合成一个数据结构(可以用来发送或接收数据)而形成的(在代码中)。

端口是网络协议用来访问连接的主机的实体。端口可以是特定于应用程序的,也可以是与特定通信媒介相关的。不同的协议使用不同的端口访问主机,如HTTP使用80端口或FTP使用23端口。您可以在应用程序中分配用户定义的端口号,但这些端口号应该大于1023。

端口打开到所需主机的连接,而套接字是网络间或进程间通信的端点。 套接字是由系统通过api(应用程序编程接口)分配的。

更微妙的区别是,当系统重新启动时,端口将出现,而套接字将被销毁。

这个问题已经有了理论上的答案。我想举一个实际的例子来解释这个问题,让大家对Socket和Port有一个更清晰的理解。

我在这里找到的

This example will walk you thru the process of connecting to a website, such as Wiley. You would open your web browser (like Mozilla Firefox) and type www.wiley.com into the address bar. Your web browser uses a Domain Name System (DNS) server to look up the name www.wiley.com to identify its IP address is. For this example, the address is 192.0.2.100. Firefox makes a connection to the 192.0.2.100 address and to the port where the application layer web server is operating. Firefox knows what port to expect because it is a well-known port . The well-known port for a web server is TCP port 80. The destination socket that Firefox attempts to connect is written as socket:port, or in this example, 192.0.2.100:80. This is the server side of the connect, but the server needs to know where to send the web page you want to view in Mozilla Firefox, so you have a socket for the client side of the connection also. The client side connection is made up of your IP address, such as 192.168.1.25, and a randomly chosen dynamic port number. The socket associated with Firefox looks like 192.168.1.25:49175. Because web servers operate on TCP port 80, both of these sockets are TCP sockets, whereas if you were connecting to a server operating on a UDP port, both the server and client sockets would be UDP sockets.