Question

I need to send a Network Order short for a game server I’m writing using Java. I read about network order, but I couldn’t find any details about a short that is sent before the data. Could someone explain to me what it is, and how to send one to a client with Java?

Answer 1

Java NIO bytes buffers have support for changing the byte order. Network byte order is Big Endian therefore.

// Allocate a big endian byte buffer
ByteBuffer bb = ByteBuffer.allocate(4096);
bb.order(ByteOrder.BIG_ENDIAN);
bb.putShort(12345);

// Write the buffer to an NIO channel
bb.flip();
channel.write(bb);

Byte Order is the order in which the bytes for numerical values that are larger than a single byte are stored. There are 2 flavours Big Endian (most significant byte first) and Little Endian (least significant byte first).