even if it is not a BABY project, there are so many solutions and framework for such things, specially in Apache, Spring and JBoss Frameworks.

In my opinion, there is no place to use directly socket for network platform projects, there are lots of protocols such as RMI, SOAP, RPC and so on, in order to get rid of implementing TCP or UDP Channels which are million times are implmeneted by so many developers for a specific task.
And in B2B using modern technologies such as BPEL, Webservices, are so recommended even if one or more of Business partner links is legacy systems, and contains my grandfather techs, However there are other simple to learn techs exist. At least we can use for example an EJB Stateful Session Bean for the sake of god to handle or cache our bloody transaction  and connection, instead of Sockets :O

My suggestion is that we shouldn't be traditional blind, having an open mind and being a little bit smart and expert, makes the things easier for us.