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To create a Socket, you need to know the Internet host to which you want to connect ....
Java Network Programming - Sockets for Servers
To create a Socket, you need to know the Internet host to which you want to connect ....
To create a Socket, you need to know the Internet host to which you want to connect. When you're writing a server, you don't know in advance who will contact you, and even if you did, you wouldn't know when that host wanted to contact you. In other words, servers are like receptionists who sit by the phone and wait for incoming calls. They don't know who will call or when, only that when the phone rings, they have to pick it up and talk to whoever is there. We can't program that behavior with the Socket class alone. Granted, there's no reason that clients written in Java have to talk to Java servers--in fact, a client doesn't care what language the server was written in or what platform it runs on. However, if Java didn't let us write servers, there would be a glaring hole in its capabilities.
Fortunately, there's no such hole. Java provides a ServerSocket class to allow programmers to write servers. Basically, a server socket's job is to sit by the phone and wait for incoming calls. More technically, a ServerSocket runs on the server and listens for incoming TCP connections. Each ServerSocket listens on a particular port on the server machine. When a client Socket on a remote host attempts to connect to that port, the server wakes up, negotiates the connection between the client and the server, and opens a regular Socket between the two hosts. In other words, server sockets wait for connections while client sockets initiate connections. Once the server socket has set up the connection, the server uses a regular Socket object to send data to the client. Data always travels over the regular socket.
The ServerSocket Class
The ServerSocket class contains everything you need to write servers in Java. It has constructors that create new ServerSocket objects, methods that listen for connections on a specified port, and methods that return a Socket object when a connection is made so that you can send and receive data. In addition, it has methods to set various options and the usual miscellaneous methods such as toString( ).
The basic life cycle of a server is:
1. A new ServerSocket is created on a particular port using a ServerSocket( ) constructor.
2. The ServerSocket listens for incoming connection attempts on that port using its accept( ) method. accept( ) blocks until a client attempts to make a connection, at which point accept( ) returns a Socket object connecting the client and the server.
3. Depending on the type of server, either the Socket's getInputStream( ) method, getOutputStream( ) method, or both are called to get input and output streams that communicate with the client.
4. The server and the client interact according to an agreed-upon protocol until it is time to close the connection.
5. The server, the client, or both close the connection.
6. The server returns to step 2 and waits for the next connection.
If step 4 is likely to take a long or indefinite amount of time, traditional Unix servers such as wu-ftpd create a new process to handle each connection so that multiple clients can be serviced at the same time. Java programs should spawn a thread to interact with the client so that the server can be ready to process the next connection sooner. A thread places a far smaller load on the server than a complete child process. In fact, the overhead of forking too many processes is why the typical Unix FTP server can't handle more than roughly 400 connections without slowing to a crawl. On the other hand, if the protocol is simple and quick and allows the server to close the connection when it's through, then it will be more efficient for the server to process the client request immediately without spawning a thread.
The operating system stores incoming connection requests addressed to a particular port in a first-in, first-out queue. The default length of the queue is normally 50, though this can vary from operating system to operating system. Some operating systems (though not Solaris) have a maximum queue length, typically five. On these systems, the queue length will be the largest possible value less than or equal to 50. After the queue fills to capacity with unprocessed connections, the host refuses additional connections on that port until slots in the queue open up. Many (though not all) clients will try to make a connection multiple times if their initial attempt is refused. Managing incoming connections and the queue is a service provided by the operating system; your program does not need to worry about it. Several ServerSocket constructors allow you to change the length of the queue if its default length isn't large enough; however, you won't be able to increase the queue beyond the maximum size that the operating system supports:
The Constructors
There are three public ServerSocket constructors:
public ServerSocket(int port) throws IOException, BindException
public ServerSocket(int port, int queueLength)
throws IOException, BindException
public ServerSocket(int port, int queueLength, InetAddress bindAddress)
throws IOException
These constructors let you specify the port, the length of the queue used to hold incoming connection requests, and the local network interface to bind to. They pretty much all do the same thing, though some use default values for the queue length and the address to bind to. Let's explore these in order.
public ServerSocket(int port) throws IOException, BindException
This constructor creates a server socket on the port specified by the argument. If you pass 0 for the port number, the system selects an available port for you. A port chosen for you by the system is sometimes called an anonymous port since you don't know its number. For servers, anonymous ports aren't very useful because clients need to know in advance which port to connect to; however, there are a few situations (which we will discuss later) in which an anonymous port might be useful.
For example, to create a server socket that would be used by an HTTP server on port 80, you would write:
try {
ServerSocket httpd = new ServerSocket(80);
}
catch (IOException e) {
System.err.println(e);
}
The constructor throws an IOException (specifically, a BindException) if the socket cannot be created and bound to the requested port. An IOException when creating a ServerSocket almost always means one of two things. Either another server socket, possibly from a completely different program, is already using the requested port, or you're trying to connect to a port from 1 to 1023 on Unix without root (superuser) privileges.
You can use this constructor to write a variation on the PortScanner programs of the previous chapter. Example 11-1 checks for ports on the local machine by attempting to create ServerSocket objects on them and seeing on which ports that fails. If you're using Unix and are not running as root, this program works only for ports 1,024 and above.
(Continued on next question...)
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