Hallo June,
I read your message once, twice. I searched through it. I spell-checked it. But I could not find the magic three characters "BSP". 😞 In this forum we do only (mostly?) BSP work. The exception to the rule was Suresh with his Java problem, and Christoph who was at least nice enough to also answer his question.
With that said and done, I am not sure I under your question. So allow me to shoot some sentences in the dark. Maybe it helps. Otherwise I will recommend you ask in another forum (maybe Web Application Server?).
First: Ports are a concept of the TCP level of the protocol stack. TCP is used to build an end to end connection from one computer to another computer, and ensure a reliable communication channel. TCP, per se, does not say anything about the actual its actual payload. You can running anything inside a TCP connection. (From univerity studies years ago.)
However, in the world, it is standard and common to run exactly one, and usually a known, protocol inside one TCP connection. These ports, and their numbers, are well defined, and published all over the Internet. For example, port 21 for FTP, port 25 for SMTP, port 110 for POP3, port 119 for NNTP, etc. There are really hunderds of these definitions.
The reason that the protocol and the port number must be know, is that it is nearly impossible to auto detect an incoming protocol. So once the bytes arrive at the server, you must know what protocol it is, and what application is going to handle it.
So this is the reason that services (accessed via protocols) are mapped onto ports which are known beforehand.
For HTTP, the default port number is usually 80. However, many people also like to use 1080, or 8080.
I know that this does not really answer your questions, but maybe it helps. Maybe on another forum you find the colleagues with indepth knowledge on this aspect.
bye, brian (returning to BSP development)
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