Question

I have a client that will connect to a server through a socket. After connecting every event that happens on the server will be sent to all registered clients.

Every client should receive data related to the event.

I just need to implement the client…meaning I need to connect to the server and receive the events’ data.

I was thinking on doing something like:

this.socket = new Socket(InetAddress.getByName(host),
this.socket.connect(socket.getLocalSocketAddress(), SOCKET_TIMEOUT);

And then launch a thread which gets the InputStream of the socket in a while loop.

But I don’t know if this the best way to implement an event driven client through a socket.

Is it?

Answer 1

This is often done by spawning a separate thread for the client that continuously makes blocking calls to read() from the stream – that way, as soon as data becomes available the read() call unblocks and can act on what it received (‘the event fires’), then it goes back to blocking waiting for the next event.