Question

I want to be able to asynchronously wait on a socket, then synchronously read from it:

for (;;) 
{
    while (data available on socket) 
    {
        read message from socket;
        process it;
    }
    do something else;
}

I need this because I want to poll a queue with messages from GUI at the same time, so the “do something else” part has a short wait().

Is this possible with Java sockets? I tried to check .available() on a DataInputStreamassociated with the socket, but

• It seems to work only when I connect, not when I accept a connection (???)
• I get no indication that the connection has been closed.

I tried to do it with a Selector, but it requires the socket channel to be in non-blocking mode all the time.

Answer 1

Why don’t you use two threads (or am I misunderstanding what you want to do)?