System-Design
I was at the office, about to go out and grab lunch from a nearby restaurant. Like many companies, I work in one that uses a service to manage our budget for paid meals. Using a mobile app, I can generate a 5-digit code, which I give to the restaurant, and it automatically charges my account. Beautiful, simple, and effective.
I was standing in line, tapping my fancy code-generation button, and after a few seconds, I witnessed a (probably) rare event. The food app suddenly showed me that my order had been accepted and confirmed. Did someone hijack my code? At this point, I thought this was just a client bug. I regenerated a new code and went on with my order.
Network communication in general is a very wide topic. It can probably fit in a large section of the New York Public Library (if not already). Fitting even a brief overview of this subject from bottom to top in a single article, might be a bit pretentious. So I won’t do it. Instead, I’ll be focusing mainly on software design patterns and technologies for communicating over a network.
Let’s unravel the mystery We will start our journey with TCP/IP . Unless your program directly communicates using electromagnetic waves, there’s a good chance that your program will communicate with the world, using TCP/IP. I know you’ve heard this term before, but what is it?
