Java Cookbook, 4th Edition

Chapter 13. Server-Side Java

13.0 Introduction

Sockets form the underpinnings of almost all networking protocols. JDBC, RMI, CORBA, EJB, and the non-Java RPC (Remote Procedure Call) and NFS (Network File System) are all implemented by connecting various types of sockets together. Socket connections can be implemented in most any language, not just Java: C, C++, Perl, and Python are also popular, and many others are possible. A client or server written in any one of these languages can communicate with its opposite written in any of the other languages. Therefore, it’s worth taking a quick look at how the ServerSocket behaves, even if you wind up utilizing the higher-level services such as RMI, JDBC, CORBA, or EJB.

The discussion looks first at the ServerSocket itself, then at writing data over a socket in various ways. Finally, I show a complete implementation of a usable network server written in Java: the chat server from the client in the previous chapter.

Tip

Most production work in server-side Java uses the Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE), recently transferred from Oracle to the Eclipse Software Foundation and renamed to Jakarta but widely referred to by the previous name (and occasionally by its very old name, “J2EE,” which was retired in 2005). Java EE provides scalability and support for building well-structured, multitiered distributed applications. EE provides the servlet framework; a servlet is a strategy object that can be installed into any standard Java EE web ...