Question

Is there a way to implement a socket server that services clients serially.
Generally the practice is to dispatch connected clients to a new thread that services requests and response however amounting to one thread per client on the server side.

I don’t want to do this because I later want to port this app to Java ME that may have a limit on the number of concurrent threads running at a point of time.

I was wondering how to solve this problem?

Answer 1

Sure, just don’t fire off a background thread to handle the client.

EDIT

It seems like what you really want is for a large number of clients to be able to connect, but not create a load of threads. Since NIO doesn’t appear to be supported how about using two threads:

• One thread loops accepting connections, passing the connected Socket to the second thread which just adds it to a list of connected sockets (this needs to be synchronized)
• A second thread which loops through its internal list of live connections, and does “some work” with each in turn.

Calling socket.setSoTimeout() with a reasonably small value should prevent the second thread waiting for too long on one connection.