A channel to a network socket.
A channel that implements this interface is a channel to a network socket. The bind
method is used to bind the socket to a local address
, the getLocalAddress
method returns the address that the socket is bound to, and the setOption
and getOption
methods are used to set and query socket options. An implementation of this interface should specify the socket options that it supports.
The bind
and setOption
methods that do not otherwise have a value to return are specified to return the network channel upon which they are invoked. This allows method invocations to be chained. Implementations of this interface should specialize the return type so that method invocations on the implementation class can be chained.