Question about sockets

[stathis gotsis]

Hello,
I have the following segment of code in a program:

in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(
mailSocket.getInputStream()));

,in which a mailSocket is an object of Socket class.

Later on, i am using this expression:

while ((serverOutput = in.readLine()) != null)
System.out.println(serverOutput);

/*other stuff here*/

,wanting to print all the lines available on my end of the Socket at the
time being. This readLine() method is blocking, thus preventing the program
from getting on to the other stuff. How can i avoid this?

Thank you for any help

 

[Chris Smith]

while ((serverOutput = in.readLine()) != null)
System.out.println(serverOutput);

/*other stuff here*/

,wanting to print all the lines available on my end of the Socket at the
time being. This readLine() method is blocking, thus preventing the program
from getting on to the other stuff. How can i avoid this?

If you don't want blocking I/O, you can't use readLine at all. You need
to use a SocketChannel and a CharBuffer to do the I/O. The code looks
considerably different, and will be tougher to understand... but in
conjunction with intelligent use of java.nio.Selector, it's potentially
the most efficient way to do things.

Another way out of the problems of blocking I/O is to continue to use
blocking I/O, but also use multiple threads. You can spawn a new thread
to read from each possible client of the socket. This is clearly not
scalable to very high numbers of concurrent connections, but it's a heck
of a lot easier than the NIO way.

--
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MindIQ Corporation