Question

I’m new in Java so please forgive any obscene errors that I may make 🙂

I’m developing a program in Java that among other things it should also handle clients that will connect to a server. The server has 3 threads running, and I have created them in the following way :

DaemonForUI du;
DaemonForPort da;
DaemonForCheck dc;

da = new DaemonForPort(3);
dc = new DaemonForCheck(5);
du = new DaemonForUI(7);

Thread t_port = new Thread(da);
Thread t_check = new Thread(dc);
Thread t_ui = new Thread(du);

t_port.setName("v1.9--PORTd");
t_check.setName("v1.9-CHECKd");
t_ui.setName("v1.9----UId");

t_port.start();
t_check.start();
t_ui.start();

Each thread handles a different aspect of the complete program. The thread t_ui is responsible to accept asynchronous incoming connections from clients, process the sent data and send other data back to the client. When I remove all the commands from the previous piece of code that has to with the t_ui thread, everything runs ok which in my case means that the other threads are printing their debug messages.

If I set the t_ui thread to run too, then the whole program blocks at the “accept” of the t_ui thread.

After reading at online manuals I saw that the accepted connections should be non-blocking, therefore use something like that :

public ServerSocketChannel ssc = null;

ssc = ServerSocketChannel.open();
ssc.socket().bind(new InetSocketAddress(port));
ssc.configureBlocking(false);

SocketChannel sc = ssc.accept();

if (sc == null) {
    ;
}
else {
    System.out.println("The server and client are connected!");
    System.out.println("Incoming connection from: " + sc.socket().getRemoteSocketAddress());
    in = new DataInputStream(new BufferedInputStream(sc.socket().getInputStream()));
    out = new DataOutputStream(new BufferedOutputStream(sc.socket().getOutputStream()));
    //other magic things take place after that point...

The thread for t_ui is created as follows :

class DaemonForUI implements Runnable{
    private int cnt;
    private int rr;
    public ListenerForUI serverListener;

    public DaemonForUI(int rr){
        cnt = 0;
        this.rr = rr;
        serverListener = new ListenerForUI();
    }

    public static String getCurrentTime() {
        final String DATE_FORMAT_NOW = "yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss";
        Calendar cal = Calendar.getInstance();
        SimpleDateFormat sdf = new SimpleDateFormat(DATE_FORMAT_NOW);
        return (sdf.format(cal.getTime()));
    }


    public void run() {
        while(true) {
            System.out.println(Thread.currentThread().getName() + "\t (" + cnt + ")\t (every " + rr + " sec) @ " + getCurrentTime());
            try{
                Thread.sleep(rr * 1000);
                cnt++;
            }
            catch (InterruptedException e){
                e.printStackTrace();
            }
        }
    }
}

Obviously, I’m doing something wrong at the creation of the socket or at the use of the thread. Do you know what is causing the problem?

Every help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Don’t use non-blocking I/O until you know you need it. Just start a new thread for every accepted socket, as well as for the accepting threads.