An Introduction to TCP/IP Application Development

The topic of TCP/IP and its reciprocating application programming interface is seldom thought about unless developing UNIX-based kernel programs. Albeit, the topic of TCP/IP plays a keystone role in a computer's ability to communicate with the outside world. Here then, one should define what "TCP/IP" is within the grand scheme of computer network engineering. In short, it is the application programming interface for software packages performing networking functionality as a means to base its development off of; TCP/IP is the rule book to how other devices across networks maintain the property of "interoptability" when communicating with one another.

To detail, the importance of interoptability within computer network communications is paramount. Specifically, the topic of abstraction is paramount. Wherein, those software developers engineering programs should not, nor would it be feasible, to anticipate the rules in which other programs are developed if no such rule book were TCP/IP interface to not have existed; interoptability would not exist if there were no standard set of rules to base development off of, negating to ability to abstract from other developers' applications. Accordingly, the grace of interoperability is not so much specifically because of TCP/IP but because of the adoption of a standard set of rules for software developers to build from. Here then, the TCP/IP interface and its rules are not applied in a spiteful fashion; TCP/IP has specific designs with corresponding behaviors in lieu of those design architectures as a means to complete a specific, predetermined task. With this, all designs have design patterns, where these patterns are the behavior for which is the manifestation of functionality the design provides with reference to its architecture; the functionality of designing for a specific task aforementioned above is alluding to the "Unit of Work" design pattern.

All in all, the fashion in which TCP/IP designs are implemented, using the TCP/IP interface as a means for implementing those design patterns, done so through UNIX BSD socket mechanisms, is to satisfy the needs of distributed systems. Wherein, these distributed systems serve as the "action-potential" for computer network communication systems between clients and servers. In as much, the natural curiosity should be as to what a distributed system is. This is a good question.

In short, a distributed system is where a client computer may access the resources of a server computer; this type of "accessing behavior" is not relegated only to one client-server pair. In as much, these pairings aforementioned can be chained, where a computer in the "nth" step of the process of satisfying a task could be classified as a server in the "nth-1" step.