introduction to sockets and web services introduction in the following two we will explore socket based and web service approaches to inter process communications these processes may be running on the same computer or different computers on the same local area network or may be geographically far apart in all cases information is sent by one program running in one process to another program running in separate process via internet sockets this introduces the core concepts involved in network programming sockets socketsor rather internet protocol (ipsockets provide programming interface to the network protocol stack that is managed by the underlying operating system using such an api means that the programmer is abstracted away from the low level details of how data is exchanged between process on (potentiallydifferent computers and can instead focus on the higher level aspects of their solution there are number of different types of ip socket availablehowever the focus in this book is on stream sockets stream socket uses the transmission control protocol (tcpto send messages such socket is often referred to as tcp/ip socket tcp provides for ordered and reliable transmission of data across the connection between two devices (or hoststhis can be important as tcp guarantees that for every message sentthat every message will not only arrive at the receiving host but that the messages will arrive in the correct order common alternative to the tcp is the user datagram protocol (or udpudp does not provide any delivery guarantees (that is messages can be lost or may arrive out of orderhoweverudp is simpler protocol and can be particularly useful for (cspringer nature switzerland ag huntadvanced guide to python programmingundergraduate topics in computer science