1.15 Application Programming Interfaces

1.15 Application Programming Interfaces

Two popular application programming interfaces (APIs) for applications using the TCP/IP protocols are called sockets and TLI (Transport Layer Interface). The former is sometimes called "Berkeley sockets," indicating where it was originally developed. The latter, originally developed by AT&T, is sometimes called XTI (X/Open Transport Interface), recognizing the work done by X/Open, an international group of computer vendors that produce their own set of standards. XTI is effectively a superset of TLI.

This text is not a programming text, but occasional reference is made to features of TCP/IP that we look at, and whether that feature is provided by the most popular API (sockets) or not. All the programming details for both sockets and TLI are available in [Stevens 1990].