Inet4Address and Inet6Address

Java 1.4 introduces two new classes, Inet4Address and Inet6Address, in order to distinguish IPv4 addresses from IPv6 addresses:

public final class Inet4Address extends InetAddress
public final class Inet6Address extends InetAddress

(In Java 1.3 and earlier, all InetAddress objects represent IPv4 addresses.)

Most of the time, you really shouldn’t be concerned with whether an address is an IPv4 or IPv6 address. In the application layer where Java programs reside, you simply don’t need to know this (and even if you do need to know, it’s quicker to check the size of the byte array returned by getAddress( ) than to use instanceof to test which subclass you have). Mostly these two classes are just implementation details you do not need to concern yourself with. Inet4Address overrides several of the methods in InetAddress but doesn’t change their behavior in any public way. Inet6Address is similar, but it does add one new method not present in the superclass, isIPv4CompatibleAddress( ):