Application Protocols

Throughout the documentation, you will see the word "protocols" mentioned. There are two general types of protocols that will be discussed in this developer's guide. The first type of protocol will be referred to as networking protocols. They are lower level protocols which define how data is exchanged between two systems. The two networking protocols that will be discussed are the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) and the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP).

Then there are what we will call the application protocols, which use the networking protocols to communicate. Application protocols deal with a specific type of functionality. For example, the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is used to upload and download files, while the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is used to send email messages. Conceptually, you can think of the networking protocols as defining the rules for how programs can communicate with one another over the Internet. The application protocols operate at a higher level, defining the rules for how a specific kind of task can be carried out, such as transferring a file from one computer to another.

The application protocols are defined in standards documents called RFCs (Request For Comments) which are maintained by the Internet Engineering Task Force. The following protocols standards are implemented by the SocketTools components:

RFC Description

792 Internet Control Message Protocol

822 Standard for the Format of ARPA Internet Text Messages

854 Telnet Protocol Specification

868 Time Protocol

954 Nicname/Whois Protocol

959 File Transfer Protocol (FTP)

977 Network News Transfer Protocol

1034 Domain Name Services

1055 Serial Line IP (SLIP)

1282 Rlogin

1288 Finger User Information Protocol

1579 Firewall-Friendly FTP

1661 The Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP)

1738 Uniform Resource Locators

1869 SMTP Service Extensions

1939 Post Office Protocol Version 3

1945 Hypertext Transfer Protocol 1.0

1951 Deflate Compressed Data Format Specification

2045 Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (Part One)

2046 Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (Part Two)

2047 Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (Part Three)

2048 Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (Part Three)

2228 FTP Security Extensions

2616 Hypertext Transfer Protocol 1.1

2821 Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP)

2980 Common NNTP Extensions

3501 Internet Message Access Protocol Version 4