Summary

This chapter provided an overview of the basic network terms and concepts. Networking is a large and complicated subject. In this chapter, we focused on those concepts that are relevant to networking in Java.

The NetworkInterface class was introduced. This class provides low-level access to the devices connected to a computer that support networking. We also learned how to obtain the MAC address for a device.

We focused on the support that Java provides to access the Internet. The foundation IP protocol was detailed. This protocol is supported by the InetAddress class. Java uses the Inet4Address and Inet6Address classes to support IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, respectively.

We also illustrated the use of the URI and URL classes. These classes possess several methods that allow us to obtain more information about specific instances. We can use these methods to split the URI or URL into parts for further processing.

We also discussed how to control some network connection properties. We will...