Advantages:
- Sockets are flexible and sufficient, can be easily implemented for general communications.
- Only updated information can be sent, 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.
- Cause low network traffic if efficiently used.
Disadvantages:
- The Java applets can establish communication only with the machine requested and not with any other machine on the network: 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
- Sockets allow only raw data to be sent. This means that both client and server need to have mechanisms to interpret the data.