Port

Last edited: 1999-07-18 18:18 +0200

If you are familiar with electronics, the term port should be a too familiar one. With electronics it is understood as any gateway which is used to lead data streams from and to the outside world.
As everything is pretty virtual in software engineering, the metaphoric definition will hold:
  • "A shipping port (harbour) for data"
A port can appear in many faces, being a network connection, a channel in a network (as with TCP/IP) or simply a printer to print the data to.