Name: dbT83986 Date: 02/17/99


The socket model in 1.1 and 1.2 is too restrictive and
forces the programmer into using IP sockets. If Java
is ever to be used to handle real applications we need
to be able to use other domains for our sockets since
the IP domain has no security. Under both Unix and
Windows we can specify named pipes which have the same
level of access control as filing system files but we
can not use these from Java. This means that we can
not reuse the existing OS models of access control to
police the connections of our Java applications.

The simplest remedy to this would be to have a greater
degree of abstraction of the end-point addressing of
sockets. If a Socket or ServerSocket were created
using a SocketAddress (or two, if you wich to specify
the local port as well as the remote port) then we
could have sub-classes of IPSocketAddress and
PipeSocketAddress (and maybe others later) and the
SocketImpl could be manufactured based on the type
of the address.
(Review ID: 53973)
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