Confusion in htons- little endian/ big endian

When I send a integer variable from one process to other through socket, and then printing the value at received end, the value is still the same without using ntohl/htonl, then where do I need to use these functions other than initializing socket structures. I understand litte/big endian. But why do we need to convert port and IP nos to host/network byte order when value remains the same. Please explain in detail how the integer is tranferred over network?