Question

So I have an assignment where I have to make a HTTP Server with chosen programming language. No big deal. I have encountered a problem that I cant seem to figure out. Every time I load the homepage that and the server response, it prints out about 5 times. Cant figure out why. Okay so what I mean:

Code Snippets:

while(true){
    connectedClient = listenSocket.accept();

    inFromClient = new BufferedReader( new InputStreamReader( connectedClient.getInputStream()));

    outToClient = new DataOutputStream(connectedClient.getOutputStream());

    String requestString = inFromClient.readLine();
    String headerLine = requestString;

    StringTokenizer tokenizer = new StringTokenizer(headerLine);
    String httpMethod = tokenizer.nextToken();
    String httpQueryString = tokenizer.nextToken();

    requestString = inFromClient.readLine();
    if (httpMethod.equals("GET")) {
        if (httpQueryString.equals("/Home")) {
        // The default home page status code 200
        dateHeader();
        connectionCloseHeader();    
    }
//other code not related
}

And this is my date header method:

public static void dateHeader() throws Exception{
    DateFormat dateFormat = new SimpleDateFormat("EEE, d MMM yyyy HH:mm:ss z");
    Date date = new Date();
    System.out.println("Date: " + dateFormat.format(date));
}

My output to the terminal will be 5 printouts of the date. I made sure that the connection and such was closed but same thing happens. Anyone have an idea why this is happening? Thanks.

EDIT

Seems that when using Chrome I get the one print out no problem. I was testing with Opera and that was giving me the 5 printouts. Perhaps something with the way the browsers work is causing the issue. Ill just use chrome now for it though.

Answer 1

I can’t account for five different invocations right off, but if you’re using a typical browser to hit this HTTP server, you’ll immediately see two requests: one for the resource itself and one for a favicon.ico. Somewhere in your request handler, you should read in and print out the entire request. Then you can see exactly what all the requests are for.