Network programming with Sockets & Channels

One of Java’s great strengths is painless networking. The Java network library designers have made it quite similar to reading and writing files, except that the “file” exists on a remote machine and the remote machine can decide exactly what it wants to do about the information you’re requesting or sending. As much as possible, the underlying details of networking have been abstracted away and taken care of within the JVM and local machine installation of Java. The programming model you use is that of a file; in fact, you actually wrap the network connection (a “socket”) with stream objects, so you end up using the same method calls as you do with all other streams. In addition, Java’s built-in multithreading is exceptionally handy when dealing with another networking issue: handling multiple connections at once.

This section introduces Java’s networking support using easy-to-understand examples.

Identifying a machine

Of course, in order to tell one machine from another and to make sure that you are connected with a particular machine, there must be some way of uniquely identifying machines on a network. Early networks were satisfied to provide unique names for machines within the local network. However, Java works within the Internet, which requires a way to uniquely identify a machine from all the others in the world. This is accomplished with the IP (Internet Protocol) address which can exist in two forms“:

1. The familiar DNS (Domain Name System) form. My domain name is bruceeckel.com, and if I have a computer called Opus in my domain, its domain name would be Opus.bruceeckel.com. This is exactly the kind of name that you use when you send email to people, and is often incorporated into a World Wide Web address.

2. Alternatively, you can use the dotted quad” form, which is four numbers separated by dots, such as 123.255.28.120.

In both cases, the IP address is represented internally as a 32-bit number[1] (so each of the quad numbers cannot exceed 255), and you can get a special Java object to represent this number from either of the forms above by using the static InetAddress.getByName( ) method that’s in java.net. The result is an object of type InetAddress that you can use to build a “socket,” as you will see later.

As a simple example of using InetAddress.getByName( ), consider what happens if you have a dial-up Internet service provider (ISP). Each time you dial up, you are assigned a temporary IP address. But while you’re connected, your IP address has the same validity as any other IP address on the Internet. If someone connects to your machine using your IP address then they can connect to a Web server or FTP server that you have running on your machine. Of course, they need to know your IP address, and since a new one is assigned each time you dial up, how can you find out what it is?

The following program uses InetAddress.getByName( ) to produce your IP address. To use it, you must know the name of your computer. On Windows 95/98, go to “Settings,” “Control Panel,” “Network,” and then select the “Identification” tab. “Computer name” is the name to put on the command line.

//: c15:WhoAmI.java

// Finds out your network address when

// you're connected to the Internet.

// {RunByHand} Must be connected to the Internet

// {Args: www.google.com}

import java.net.*;

public class WhoAmI {

public static void main(String[] args)

throws Exception {

if(args.length != 1) {

System.err.println(

"Usage: WhoAmI MachineName");

System.exit(1);

}

InetAddress a =

InetAddress.getByName(args[0]);

System.out.println(a);

}

} ///:~

In this case, the machine is called “peppy.” So, once I’ve connected to my ISP I run the program:

java WhoAmI peppy

I get back a message like this (of course, the address is different each time):

peppy/199.190.87.75

If I tell my friend this address and I have a Web server running on my computer, he can connect to it by going to the URL http://199.190.87.75 (only as long as I continue to stay connected during that session). This can sometimes be a handy way to distribute information to someone else, or to test out a Web site configuration before posting it to a “real” server.

Servers and clients

The whole point of a network is to allow two machines to connect and talk to each other. Once the two machines have found each other they can have a nice, two-way conversation. But how do they find each other? It’s like getting lost in an amusement park: one machine has to stay in one place and listen while the other machine says, “Hey, where are you?”

The machine that “stays in one place” is called the server, and the one that seeks is called the client. This distinction is important only while the client is trying to connect to the server. Once they’ve connected, it becomes a two-way communication process and it doesn’t matter anymore that one happened to take the role of server and the other happened to take the role of the client.

So the job of the server is to listen for a connection, and that’s performed by the special server object that you create. The job of the client is to try to make a connection to a server, and this is performed by the special client object you create. Once the connection is made, you’ll see that at both server and client ends, the connection is magically turned into an I/O stream object, and from then on you can treat the connection as if you were reading from and writing to a file. Thus, after the connection is made you will just use the familiar I/O commands from Chapter 11. This is one of the nice features of Java networking.

Testing programs without a network

For many reasons, you might not have a client machine, a server machine, and a network available to test your programs. You might be performing exercises in a classroom situation, or you could be writing programs that aren’t yet stable enough to put onto the network. The creators of the Internet Protocol were aware of this issue, and they created a special address called localhost to be the “local loopback” IP address for testing without a network. The generic way to produce this address in Java is:

InetAddress addr = InetAddress.getByName(null);

If you hand getByName( ) a null, it defaults to using the localhost. The InetAddress is what you use to refer to the particular machine, and you must produce this before you can go any further. You can’t manipulate the contents of an InetAddress (but you can print them out, as you’ll see in the next example). The only way you can create an InetAddress is through one of that class’s overloaded static member methods getByName( ) (which is what you’ll usually use), getAllByName( ), or getLocalHost( ).

You can also produce the local loopback address by handing it the string localhost:

InetAddress.getByName("localhost");

(assuming “localhost” is configured in your machine’s “hosts” table), or by using its dotted quad form to name the reserved IP number for the loopback:

InetAddress.getByName("127.0.0.1");

All three forms produce the same result.

Port: a unique place
within the machine

An IP address isn’t enough to identify a unique server, since many servers can exist on one machine. Each IP machine also contains ports, and when you’re setting up a client or a server you must choose a port where both client and server agree to connect; if you’re meeting someone, the IP address is the neighborhood and the port is the bar.

The port is not a physical location in a machine, but a software abstraction (mainly for bookkeeping purposes). The client program knows how to connect to the machine via its IP address, but how does it connect to a desired service (potentially one of many on that machine)? That’s where the port numbers come in as a second level of addressing. The idea is that if you ask for a particular port, you’re requesting the service that’s associated with the port number. The time of day is a simple example of a service. Typically, each service is associated with a unique port number on a given server machine. It’s up to the client to know ahead of time which port number the desired service is running on.

The system services reserve the use of ports 1 through 1024, so you shouldn’t use those or any other port that you know to be in use. The first choice for examples in this book will be port 8080 (in memory of the venerable old 8-bit Intel 8080 chip in my first computer, a CP/M machine).

Sockets

The socket is the software abstraction used to represent the “terminals” of a connection between two machines. For a given connection, there’s a socket on each machine, and you can imagine a hypothetical “cable” running between the two machines with each end of the “cable” plugged into a socket. Of course, the physical hardware and cabling between machines is completely unknown. The whole point of the abstraction is that we don’t have to know more than is necessary.

In Java, you create a socket to make the connection to the other machine, then you get an InputStream and OutputStream (or, with the appropriate converters, Reader and Writer) from the socket in order to be able to treat the connection as an I/O stream object. There are two stream-based socket classes: a ServerSocket that a server uses to “listen” for incoming connections and a Socket that a client uses in order to initiate a connection. Once a client makes a socket connection, the ServerSocket returns (via the accept( ) method) a corresponding Socket through which communications will take place on the server side. From then on, you have a true Socket to Socket connection and you treat both ends the same way because they are the same. At this point, you use the methods getInputStream( ) and getOutputStream( ) to produce the corresponding InputStream and OutputStream objects from each Socket. These must be wrapped inside buffers and formatting classes just like any other stream object described in Chapter 11.

The use of the term ServerSocket would seem to be another example of a confusing naming scheme in the Java libraries. You might think ServerSocket would be better named “ServerConnector” or something without the word “Socket” in it. You might also think that ServerSocket and Socket should both be inherited from some common base class. Indeed, the two classes do have several methods in common, but not enough to give them a common base class. Instead, ServerSocket’s job is to wait until some other machine connects to it, then to return an actual Socket. This is why ServerSocket seems to be a bit misnamed, since its job isn’t really to be a socket but instead to make a Socket object when someone else connects to it.

However, the ServerSocket does create a physical “server” or listening socket on the host machine. This socket listens for incoming connections and then returns an “established” socket (with the local and remote endpoints defined) via the accept( ) method. The confusing part is that both of these sockets (listening and established) are associated with the same server socket. The listening socket can accept only new connection requests and not data packets. So while ServerSocket doesn’t make much sense programmatically, it does “physically.”

When you create a ServerSocket, you give it only a port number. You don’t have to give it an IP address because it’s already on the machine it represents. When you create a Socket, however, you must give both the IP address and the port number where you’re trying to connect. (However, the Socket that comes back from ServerSocket.accept( ) already contains all this information.)

A simple server and client

This example makes the simplest use of servers and clients using sockets. All the server does is wait for a connection, then uses the Socket produced by that connection to create an InputStream and OutputStream. These are converted to a Reader and a Writer, then wrapped in a BufferedReader and a PrintWriter. After that, everything it reads from the BufferedReader it echoes to the PrintWriter until it receives the line “END,” at which time it closes the connection.

The client makes the connection to the server, then creates an OutputStream and performs the same wrapping as in the server. Lines of text are sent through the resulting PrintWriter. The client also creates an InputStream (again, with appropriate conversions and wrapping) to hear what the server is saying (which, in this case, is just the words echoed back).

Both the server and client use the same port number and the client uses the local loopback address to connect to the server on the same machine so you don’t have to test it over a network. (For some configurations, you might need to be connected to a network for the programs to work, even if you aren’t communicating over that network.)

Here is the server:

//: c15:JabberServer.java

// Very simple server that just

// echoes whatever the client sends.

// {RunByHand}

import java.io.*;

import java.net.*;

public class JabberServer {

// Choose a port outside of the range 1-1024:

public static final int PORT = 8080;

public static void main(String[] args)

throws IOException {

ServerSocket s = new ServerSocket(PORT);

System.out.println("Started: " + s);

try {

// Blocks until a connection occurs:

Socket socket = s.accept();

try {

System.out.println(

"Connection accepted: "+ socket);

BufferedReader in =

new BufferedReader(

new InputStreamReader(

socket.getInputStream()));

// Output is automatically flushed

// by PrintWriter:

PrintWriter out =

new PrintWriter(

new BufferedWriter(

new OutputStreamWriter(

socket.getOutputStream())),true);

while (true) {

String str = in.readLine();

if (str.equals("END")) break;

System.out.println("Echoing: " + str);

out.println(str);

}

// Always close the two sockets...

} finally {

System.out.println("closing...");

socket.close();

}

} finally {

s.close();

}

} ///:~

You can see that the ServerSocket just needs a port number, not an IP address (since it’s running on this machine!). When you call accept( ), the method blocks until some client tries to connect to it. That is, it’s there waiting for a connection, but other processes can run (see Chapter 14). When a connection is made, accept( ) returns with a Socket object representing that connection.

The responsibility for cleaning up the sockets is crafted carefully here. If the ServerSocket constructor fails, the program just quits (notice we must assume that the constructor for ServerSocket doesn’t leave any open network sockets lying around if it fails). For this case, main( ) throws IOException so a try block is not necessary. If the ServerSocket constructor is successful then all other method calls must be guarded in a try-finally block to ensure that, no matter how the block is left, the ServerSocket is properly closed.

The same logic is used for the Socket returned by accept( ). If accept( ) fails, then we must assume that the Socket doesn’t exist or hold any resources, so it doesn’t need to be cleaned up. If it’s successful, however, the following statements must be in a try-finally block so that if they fail the Socket will still be cleaned up. Care is required here because sockets use important nonmemory resources, so you must be diligent in order to clean them up (since there is no destructor in Java to do it for you).

Both the ServerSocket and the Socket produced by accept( ) are printed to System.out. This means that their toString( ) methods are automatically called. These produce:

ServerSocket[addr=0.0.0.0,PORT=0,localport=8080]

Socket[addr=127.0.0.1,PORT=1077,localport=8080]

Shortly, you’ll see how these fit together with what the client is doing.

The next part of the program looks just like opening files for reading and writing except that the InputStream and OutputStream are created from the Socket object. Both the InputStream and OutputStream objects are converted to Reader and Writer objects using the “converter” classes InputStreamReader and OutputStreamWriter, respectively. You could also have used the Java 1.0 InputStream and OutputStream classes directly, but with output there’s a distinct advantage to using the Writer approach. This appears with PrintWriter, which has an overloaded constructor that takes a second argument, a boolean flag that indicates whether to automatically flush the output at the end of each println( ) (but not print( )) statement. Every time you write to out, its buffer must be flushed so the information goes out over the network. Flushing is important for this particular example because the client and server each wait for a line from the other party before proceeding. If flushing doesn’t occur, the information will not be put onto the network until the buffer is full, which causes lots of problems in this example.

When writing network programs you need to be careful about using automatic flushing. Every time you flush the buffer a packet must be created and sent. In this case, that’s exactly what we want, since if the packet containing the line isn’t sent then the handshaking back and forth between server and client will stop. Put another way, the end of a line is the end of a message. But in many cases, messages aren’t delimited by lines so it’s much more efficient to not use auto flushing and instead let the built-in buffering decide when to build and send a packet. This way, larger packets can be sent and the process will be faster.

Note that, like virtually all streams you open, these are buffered. There’s an exercise at the end of this chapter to show you what happens if you don’t buffer the streams (things get slow).

The infinite while loop reads lines from the BufferedReader in and writes information to System.out and to the PrintWriter out. Note that in and out could be any streams, they just happen to be connected to the network.

When the client sends the line consisting of “END,” the program breaks out of the loop and closes the Socket.

Here’s the client:

//: c15:JabberClient.java

// Very simple client that just sends

// lines to the server and reads lines

// that the server sends.

// {RunByHand}

import java.net.*;

import java.io.*;

public class JabberClient {

public static void main(String[] args)

throws IOException {

// Passing null to getByName() produces the

// special "Local Loopback" IP address, for

// testing on one machine w/o a network:

InetAddress addr =

InetAddress.getByName(null);

// Alternatively, you can use

// the address or name:

// InetAddress addr =

// InetAddress.getByName("127.0.0.1");

// InetAddress addr =

// InetAddress.getByName("localhost");

System.out.println("addr = " + addr);

Socket socket =

new Socket(addr, JabberServer.PORT);

// Guard everything in a try-finally to make

// sure that the socket is closed:

try {

System.out.println("socket = " + socket);

BufferedReader in =

new BufferedReader(

new InputStreamReader(

socket.getInputStream()));

// Output is automatically flushed

// by PrintWriter:

PrintWriter out =

new PrintWriter(

new BufferedWriter(

new OutputStreamWriter(

socket.getOutputStream())),true);

for(int i = 0; i < 10; i ++) {

out.println("howdy " + i);

String str = in.readLine();

System.out.println(str);

}

out.println("END");

} finally {

System.out.println("closing...");

socket.close();

}

} ///:~

In main( ) you can see all three ways to produce the InetAddress of the local loopback IP address: using null, localhost, or the explicit reserved address 127.0.0.1. Of course, if you want to connect to a machine across a network you substitute that machine’s IP address. When the InetAddress addr is printed (via the automatic call to its toString( ) method) the result is:

localhost/127.0.0.1

By handing getByName( ) a null, it defaulted to finding the localhost, and that produced the special address 127.0.0.1.

Note that the Socket called socket is created with both the InetAddress and the port number. To understand what it means when you print one of these Socket objects, remember that an Internet connection is determined uniquely by these four pieces of data: clientHost, clientPortNumber, serverHost, and serverPortNumber. When the server comes up, it takes up its assigned port (8080) on the localhost (127.0.0.1). When the client comes up, it is allocated to the next available port on its machine, 1077 in this case, which also happens to be on the same machine (127.0.0.1) as the server. Now, in order for data to move between the client and server, each side has to know where to send it. Therefore, during the process of connecting to the “known” server, the client sends a “return address” so the server knows where to send its data. This is what you see in the example output for the server side:

Socket[addr=127.0.0.1,port=1077,localport=8080]

This means that the server just accepted a connection from 127.0.0.1 on port 1077 while listening on its local port (8080). On the client side:

Socket[addr=localhost/127.0.0.1,PORT=8080,localport=1077]

which means that the client made a connection to 127.0.0.1 on port 8080 using the local port 1077.

You’ll notice that every time you start up the client anew, the local port number is incremented. It starts at 1025 (one past the reserved block of ports) and keeps going up until you reboot the machine, at which point it starts at 1025 again. (On UNIX machines, once the upper limit of the socket range is reached, the numbers will wrap around to the lowest available number again.)

Once the Socket object has been created, the process of turning it into a BufferedReader and PrintWriter is the same as in the server (again, in both cases you start with a Socket). Here, the client initiates the conversation by sending the string “howdy” followed by a number. Note that the buffer must again be flushed (which happens automatically via the second argument to the PrintWriter constructor). If the buffer isn’t flushed, the whole conversation will hang because the initial “howdy” will never get sent (the buffer isn’t full enough to cause the send to happen automatically). Each line that is sent back from the server is written to System.out to verify that everything is working correctly. To terminate the conversation, the agreed-upon “END” is sent. If the client simply hangs up, then the server throws an exception.

You can see that the same care is taken here to ensure that the network resources represented by the Socket are properly cleaned up, using a try-finally block.

Sockets produce a “dedicated” connection that persists until it is explicitly disconnected. (The dedicated connection can still be disconnected unexplicitly if one side, or an intermediary link, of the connection crashes.) This means the two parties are locked in communication and the connection is constantly open. This seems like a logical approach to networking, but it puts an extra load on the network. Later in this chapter you’ll see a different approach to networking, in which the connections are only temporary.

Serving multiple clients

The JabberServer works, but it can handle only one client at a time. In a typical server, you’ll want to be able to deal with many clients at once. The answer is multithreading, and in languages that don’t directly support multithreading this means all sorts of complications. In Chapter 14 you saw that multithreading in Java is about as simple as possible, considering that multithreading is a rather complex topic. Because threading in Java is reasonably straightforward, making a server that handles multiple clients is relatively easy.

The basic scheme is to make a single ServerSocket in the server and call accept( ) to wait for a new connection. When accept( ) returns, you take the resulting Socket and use it to create a new thread whose job is to serve that particular client. Then you call accept( ) again to wait for a new client.

In the following server code, you can see that it looks similar to the JabberServer.java example except that all of the operations to serve a particular client have been moved inside a separate thread class:

//: c15:MultiJabberServer.java

// A server that uses multithreading

// to handle any number of clients.

// {RunByHand}

import java.io.*;

import java.net.*;

class ServeOneJabber extends Thread {

private Socket socket;

private BufferedReader in;

private PrintWriter out;

public ServeOneJabber(Socket s)

throws IOException {

socket = s;

in =

new BufferedReader(

new InputStreamReader(

socket.getInputStream()));

// Enable auto-flush:

out =

new PrintWriter(

new BufferedWriter(

new OutputStreamWriter(

socket.getOutputStream())), true);

// If any of the above calls throw an

// exception, the caller is responsible for

// closing the socket. Otherwise the thread

// will close it.

start(); // Calls run()

}

public void run() {

try {

while (true) {

String str = in.readLine();

if (str.equals("END")) break;

System.out.println("Echoing: " + str);

out.println(str);

}

System.out.println("closing...");

} catch(IOException e) {

System.err.println("IO Exception");

} finally {

try {

socket.close();

} catch(IOException e) {

System.err.println("Socket not closed");

}

public class MultiJabberServer {

static final int PORT = 8080;

public static void main(String[] args)

throws IOException {

ServerSocket s = new ServerSocket(PORT);

System.out.println("Server Started");

try {

while(true) {

// Blocks until a connection occurs:

Socket socket = s.accept();

try {

new ServeOneJabber(socket);

} catch(IOException e) {

// If it fails, close the socket,

// otherwise the thread will close it:

socket.close();

}

} finally {

s.close();

}

} ///:~

The ServeOneJabber thread takes the Socket object that’s produced by accept( ) in main( ) every time a new client makes a connection. Then, as before, it creates a BufferedReader and auto-flushed PrintWriter object using the Socket. Finally, it calls the special Thread method start( ), which performs thread initialization and then calls run( ). This performs the same kind of action as in the previous example: reading something from the socket and then echoing it back until it reads the special “END” signal.

The responsibility for cleaning up the socket must again be carefully designed. In this case, the socket is created outside of the ServeOneJabber so the responsibility can be shared. If the ServeOneJabber constructor fails, it will just throw the exception to the caller, who will then clean up the thread. But if the constructor succeeds, then the ServeOneJabber object takes over responsibility for cleaning up the thread, in its run( ).

Notice the simplicity of the MultiJabberServer. As before, a ServerSocket is created and accept( ) is called to allow a new connection. But this time, the return value of accept( ) (a Socket) is passed to the constructor for ServeOneJabber, which creates a new thread to handle that connection. When the connection is terminated, the thread simply goes away.

If the creation of the ServerSocket fails, the exception is again thrown through main( ). But if the creation succeeds, the outer try-finally guarantees its cleanup. The inner try-catch guards only against the failure of the ServeOneJabber constructor; if the constructor succeeds, then the ServeOneJabber thread will close the associated socket.

To test that the server really does handle multiple clients, the following program creates many clients (using threads) that connect to the same server. The maximum number of threads allowed is determined by the final int MAX_THREADS.

//: c15:MultiJabberClient.java

// Client that tests the MultiJabberServer

// by starting up multiple clients.

// {RunByHand}

import java.net.*;

import java.io.*;

class JabberClientThread extends Thread {

private Socket socket;

private BufferedReader in;

private PrintWriter out;

private static int counter = 0;

private int id = counter++;

private static int threadcount = 0;

public static int threadCount() {

return threadcount;

}

public JabberClientThread(InetAddress addr) {

System.out.println("Making client " + id);

threadcount++;

try {

socket =

new Socket(addr, MultiJabberServer.PORT);

} catch(IOException e) {

System.err.println("Socket failed");

// If the creation of the socket fails,

// nothing needs to be cleaned up.

}

try {

in =

new BufferedReader(

new InputStreamReader(

socket.getInputStream()));

// Enable auto-flush:

out =

new PrintWriter(

new BufferedWriter(

new OutputStreamWriter(

socket.getOutputStream())), true);

start();

} catch(IOException e) {

// The socket should be closed on any

// failures other than the socket

// constructor:

try {

socket.close();

} catch(IOException e2) {

System.err.println("Socket not closed");

}

// Otherwise the socket will be closed by

// the run() method of the thread.

}

public void run() {

try {

for(int i = 0; i < 25; i++) {

out.println("Client " + id + ": " + i);

String str = in.readLine();

System.out.println(str);

}

out.println("END");

} catch(IOException e) {

System.err.println("IO Exception");

} finally {

// Always close it:

try {

socket.close();

} catch(IOException e) {

System.err.println("Socket not closed");

}

threadcount--; // Ending this thread

}

public class MultiJabberClient {

static final int MAX_THREADS = 40;

public static void main(String[] args)

throws IOException, InterruptedException {

InetAddress addr =

InetAddress.getByName(null);

while(true) {

if(JabberClientThread.threadCount()

< MAX_THREADS)

new JabberClientThread(addr);

Thread.currentThread().sleep(100);

}

} ///:~

The JabberClientThread constructor takes an InetAddress and uses it to open a Socket. You’re probably starting to see the pattern: the Socket is always used to create some kind of Reader and/or Writer (or InputStream and/or OutputStream) object, which is the only way that the Socket can be used. (You can, of course, write a class or two to automate this process instead of doing all the typing if it becomes painful.) Again, start( ) performs thread initialization and calls run( ). Here, messages are sent to the server and information from the server is echoed to the screen. However, the thread has a limited lifetime and eventually completes. Note that the socket is cleaned up if the constructor fails after the socket is created but before the constructor completes. Otherwise the responsibility for calling close( ) for the socket is relegated to the run( ) method.

The threadcount keeps track of how many JabberClientThread objects currently exist. It is incremented as part of the constructor and decremented as run( ) exits (which means the thread is terminating). In MultiJabberClient.main( ), you can see that the number of threads is tested, and if there are too many, no more are created. Then the method sleeps. This way, some threads will eventually terminate and more can be created. You can experiment with MAX_THREADS to see where your particular system begins to have trouble with too many connections.

Datagrams

The examples you’ve seen so far use the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP, also known as stream-based sockets), which is designed for ultimate reliability and guarantees that the data will get there. It allows retransmission of lost data, it provides multiple paths through different routers in case one goes down, and bytes are delivered in the order they are sent. All this control and reliability comes at a cost: TCP has a high overhead.

There’s a second protocol, called User Datagram Protocol (UDP), which doesn’t guarantee that the packets will be delivered and doesn’t guarantee that they will arrive in the order they were sent. It’s called an “unreliable protocol” (TCP is a “reliable protocol”), which sounds bad, but because it’s much faster it can be useful. There are some applications, such as an audio signal, in which it isn’t so critical if a few packets are dropped here or there but speed is vital. Or consider a time-of-day server, where it really doesn’t matter if one of the messages is lost. Also, some applications might be able to fire off a UDP message to a server and can then assume, if there is no response in a reasonable period of time, that the message was lost.

Typically, you’ll do most of your direct network programming with TCP, and only occasionally will you use UDP. There’s a more complete treatment of UDP, including an example, in the first edition of this book (available on the CD ROM bound into this book, or as a free download from www.BruceEckel.com).

Using URLs from within an applet

It’s possible for an applet to cause the display of any URL through the Web browser the applet is running within. You can do this with the following line:

getAppletContext().showDocument(u);

in which u is the URL object. Here’s a simple exam

Revision 1.1, 5-06-2003

Introduction to Enterprise Programming

Prerequisites

Summary

Network programming with Sockets & Channels

Identifying a machine

Servers and clients

Testing programs without a network

Port: a unique place
within the machine

Sockets

A simple server and client

Serving multiple clients

Datagrams

Using URLs from within an applet