Sockets are flexible and sufficient. Efficient socket based programming can be easily implemented for general communications. Sockets cause low network traffic. Unlike HTML forms and CGI scripts that generate and transfer whole web pages for each new request, Java applets can send only necessary updated information.

Security restrictions are sometimes overbearing because a Java applet running in a Web browser is only able to establish connections to the machine where it came from, and to nowhere else on the network   Despite all of the useful and helpful Java features, Socket based communications allows only to send packets of raw data between applications. Both the client-side and server-side have to provide mechanisms to make the data useful in any way.