The QAbstractSocket class provides the base functionality common to all socket types.
The QAbstractSocket class provides the base functionality common to all socket types.
QAbstractSocket is the base class for QTcpSocket and QUdpSocket and contains all common functionality of these two classes. If you need a socket, you have two options:
- Instantiate QTcpSocket or QUdpSocket.
- Create a native socket descriptor, instantiate QAbstractSocket, and call setSocketDescriptor() to wrap the native socket.
TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) is a reliable, stream-oriented, connection-oriented transport protocol. UDP (User Datagram Protocol) is an unreliable, datagram-oriented, connectionless protocol. In practice, this means that TCP is better suited for continuous transmission of data, whereas the more lightweight UDP can be used when reliability isn't important.
QAbstractSocket's API unifies most of the differences between the two protocols. For example, although UDP is connectionless, connectToHost() establishes a virtual connection for UDP sockets, enabling you to use QAbstractSocket in more or less the same way regardless of the underlying protocol. Internally, QAbstractSocket remembers the address and port passed to connectToHost(), and functions like read() and write() use these values.
Reference: http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-5/QAbstractSocket.html
