Section 14.1.

14.1. "Socket to Me!"

The preceding chapter introduced Internet fundamentals and explored socketsthe underlying communications mechanism over which bytes flow on the Net. In this chapter, we climb the encapsulation hierarchy one level and shift our focus to Python tools that support the client-side interfaces of common Internet protocols.

We talked about the Internet's higher-level protocols in the abstract at the start of the preceding chapter, and you should probably review that material if you skipped over it the first time around. In short, protocols define the structure of the conversations that take place to accomplish most of the Internet tasks we're all familiar withreading email, transferring files by FTP, fetching web pages, and so on.

At the most basic level, all of these protocol dialogs happen over sockets using fixed and standard message structures and ports, so in some sense this chapter builds upon the last. But as we'll see, Python's protocol modules hide most of the underlying detailsscripts generally need to deal only with simple objects and methods, and Python automates the socket and messaging logic required by the protocol.

In this chapter, we'll concentrate on the FTP and email protocol modules in Python, and we'll peek at a few others along the way (NNTP news, HTTP web pages, and so on). Because it is so prevalent, we will especially focus on email in much of this chapter, as well as in the two to followwe'll use tools and techniques introduced here in the larger PyMailGUI and PyMailCGI client and server-side programs of Chapters 15 and 17.

All of the tools employed in examples here are in the standard Python library and come with the Python system. All of the examples here are also designed to run on the client side of a network connectionthese scripts connect to an already running server to request interaction and can be run from a basic PC or other client device. And as usual, all the code here is also designed to teach us something about Python programming in generalwe'll refactor FTP examples and package email code to show object-oriented programming (OOP) in action.

In the next chapter, we'll look at a complete client-side program example before moving on to explore scripts designed to be run on the server side instead. Python programs can also produce pages on a web server, and there is support in the Python world for implementing the server side of things like HTTP, email, and FTP. For now, let's focus on the client.