What are the advantages and disadvantages of Socket ?

The combination of an IP address and a port number is called a socket.

Advantages of Java Sockets

• Sockets are flexible and sufficient.
• Efficient socket based programming can be easily implemented for general communications.
• Sockets cause low network traffic.
• Unlike HTML forms and CGI scripts that generate and transfer whole web pages for each new request, Java applets can send only necessary updated information. 

Disadvantages of Java Sockets

• Security restrictions are sometimes overbearing because a Java applet running in a Web browser is only able to establish connections to the machine where it came from, and to nowhere else on the network.
• Despite all of the useful and helpful Java features, Socket based communications allows only to send packets of raw data between applications. Both the client-side and server-side have to provide mechanisms to make the data useful in any way.
• Since the data formats and protocols remain application specific, the re-use of socket based implementations is limited.