I'm trying to create a single-threaded echo-server, but I can't figure out how to send the input from the client back to the client again from the server. The client connects to the server alright, but it's when it's waiting for a response that it throws an IOException. I have tried connecting my chat client to other chat servers, hence I'm sure the fault is in the chat server implementation.
I'm guessing the "villain of the piece" is this method presented below that takes the input from the connected client and sends it back, but I'm not sure why it doesn't work.
private void processClientRequest(Socket clientSocket) throws IOException {
InputStream in = clientSocket.getInputStream();
PrintWriter out =
new PrintWriter(clientSocket.getOutputStream());
long time = System.currentTimeMillis();
out.write("Server - " + time + ": " + in);
out.close();
in.close();
}
Please tell me if this method isn't the issue and you need other parts of my code instead.
Thanks in advance!
Edit: I have now managed to get my server to respond to the client. I did this by changing the processClientRequest method to this:
try {
BufferedReader in =
new BufferedReader(
new InputStreamReader(clientSocket.getInputStream()));
PrintWriter out =
new PrintWriter(clientSocket.getOutputStream());
long time = System.currentTimeMillis();
out.write("Server - " + time + ": " + in.readLine());
out.close();
try {
in.close();
} catch (IOException e) {
System.err.println("Couldn't close input stream");
}
} catch(IOException e) {
System.err.println("Got an IOException error while reading or writing from/to client");
}
But as of now my server can only respond the client once. If the client writes to the server a second time it does get a response, but instead of the clients message, it's "null". And since I want my echo server to be able to answer the client until the client shuts down or something like that, I need to figure out how to change that. I figure I'm going to need some kind of while loop to make this happen, but I have tried for example putting the whole try statement into an infinite while loop, but that just gave me loads of IOExceptions.
You're not reading the clients input. You're just passing the toString to your out. You need to make a while loop and read from in. Maybe in a seperate thread unless you're sure the input is short. In test code should be okay:
private void processClientRequest(Socket clientSocket) throws IOException {
InputStream in = clientSocket.getInputStream();//wrap this in a object stream or other to read lines/ utf
int i = 0;
while(i++ < 1000 && in.available() > 0){
int read = in.read();//use it if u want, like to a string builder declared out of loop and echo it back after u read input
}
PrintWriter out =
new PrintWriter(clientSocket.getOutputStream());
long time = System.currentTimeMillis();
out.write("Server - " + time + ": " + in);
out.close();//should be in seperate try catches so if 1 close fails u still close other and finally close socket in 3rd try catch
in.close();
}
Socket server with working echo server, mini web server and helpful in many more ways.
Related
I've created a client-server connection, something like a chat system. Previously I was using a while loop on the client side, and it was waiting to read a message from the console every time (of course server has a while loop as well to serve forever). But now, I'm trying to first create a connection at the beginning of the session, and then occasionally send a message during the session, so to maintain a permanent and persistent connection.
Currently, without the while loop, the client closes the connection and I don't know how to find a workaround.
Here is the client code:
import java.net.*;
import java.io.*;
public class ControlClientTest {
private Socket socket = null;
// private BufferedReader console = null;
private DataOutputStream streamOut = null;
public static void main(String args[]) throws InterruptedException {
ControlClientTest client = null;
String IP="127.0.0.1";
client = new ControlClientTest(IP, 5555);
}
public ControlClientTest(String serverName, int serverPort) throws InterruptedException {
System.out.println("Establishing connection. Please wait ...");
try {
socket = new Socket(serverName, serverPort);
System.out.println("Connected: " + socket);
start();
} catch (UnknownHostException uhe) {
System.out.println("Host unknown: " + uhe.getMessage());
} catch (IOException ioe) {
System.out.println("Unexpected exception: " + ioe.getMessage());
}
String line = "";
// while (!line.equals(".bye")) {
try {
Thread.sleep(1000);
//TODO get data from input
// line = console.readLine();
line="1";
if(line.equals("1"))
line="1,123";
streamOut.writeUTF(line);
streamOut.flush();
} catch (IOException ioe) {
System.out.println("Sending error: " + ioe.getMessage());
}
// }
}
public void start() throws IOException {
// console = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(System.in));
streamOut = new DataOutputStream(socket.getOutputStream());
}
}
And here is the Server code:
import java.awt.*;
import java.io.*;
import java.net.ServerSocket;
import java.net.Socket;
public class ControlServer {
private Socket socket = null;
private ServerSocket server = null;
private DataInputStream streamIn = null;
public static void main(String args[]) {
ControlServer server = null;
server = new ControlServer(5555);
}
public ControlServer(int port) {
try {
System.out
.println("Binding to port " + port + ", please wait ...");
server = new ServerSocket(port);
System.out.println("Server started: " + server);
System.out.println("Waiting for a client ...");
socket = server.accept();
System.out.println("Client accepted: " + socket);
open();
boolean done = false;
while (!done) {
try {
String line = streamIn.readUTF();
// TODO get the data and do something
System.out.println(line);
done = line.equals(".bye");
} catch (IOException ioe) {
done = true;
}
}
close();
} catch (IOException ioe) {
System.out.println(ioe);
}
}
public void open() throws IOException {
streamIn = new DataInputStream(new BufferedInputStream(
socket.getInputStream()));
}
public void close() throws IOException {
if (socket != null)
socket.close();
if (streamIn != null)
streamIn.close();
}
}
I would like to summarize some good practices regarding the stability of TCP/IP connections which I apply on a daily basis.
Good practice 1 : Built-in Keep-Alive
socket.setKeepAlive(true);
It automatically sends a signal after a period of inactivity and checks for a reply. The keep-alive interval is operating system dependent though, and has some shortcomings. But all by all, it could improve the stability of your connection.
Good practice 2 : SoTimeout
Whenver you perform a read (or readUTF in your case), your thread will actually block forever. In my experience this is bad practice for the following reasons: It's difficult to close your application. Just calling socket.close() is dirty.
A clean solution, is a simple read time-out (e.g. 200ms). You can do this with the setSoTimeoutmethod. When the read() method timeouts it will throw a SocketTimeoutException. (which is a subclass of IOException).
socket.setSoTimeout(timeoutInterval);
Here is an example to implement the loop. Please note the shutdown condition. Just set it to true, and your thread will die peacefully.
while (!shutdown)
{
try
{
// some method that calls your read and parses the message.
code = readData();
if (code == null) continue;
}
catch (SocketTimeoutException ste)
{
// A SocketTimeoutExc. is a simple read timeout, just ignore it.
// other IOExceptions will not be stopped here.
}
}
Good practice 3 : Tcp No-Delay
Use the following setting when you are often interfacing small commands that need to be handled quickly.
try
{
socket.setTcpNoDelay(true);
}
catch (SocketException e)
{
}
Good practice 4 : A heartbeat
Actually there are a lot of side scenario's that are not covered yet.
One of them for example are server applications that are designed to only communicate with 1 client at a time. Sometimes they accept connections and even accept messages, but never reply to them.
Another one: sometimes when you lose your connection it actually can take a long time before your OS notices this. Possibly due to the shortcomings described in good practice 3, but also in more complex network situations (e.g. using RS232-To-Ethernet converters, VMware servers, etc) this happens often.
The solution here is to create a thread that sends a message every x seconds and then waits for a reply. (e.g. every 15 seconds). For this you need to create a second thread that just sends a message every 15 seconds. Secondly, you need to expand the code of good practice 2 a little bit.
try
{
code = readData();
if (code == null) continue;
lastRead = System.currentTimeMillis();
// whenever you receive the heart beat reply, just ignore it.
if (MSG_HEARTBEAT.equals(code)) continue;
// todo: handle other messages
}
catch (SocketTimeoutException ste)
{
// in a typical situation the soTimeout is about 200ms
// the heartbeat interval is usually a couple of seconds.
// and the heartbeat timeout interval a couple of seconds more.
if ((heartbeatTimeoutInterval > 0) &&
((System.currentTimeMillis() - lastRead) > heartbeatTimeoutInterval))
{
// no reply to heartbeat received.
// end the loop and perform a reconnect.
break;
}
}
You need to decide if your client or server should send the message. That decision is not so important. But e.g. if your client sends the message, then your client will need an additional thread to send the message. Your server should send a reply when it receives the message. When your client receives the answer, it should just continue (i.e. see code above). And both parties should check: "how long has it been?" in a very similar way.
You could wrap a thread around the connection and have it periodically send a status to keep the line open, say every 30 seconds or whatever. Then, when it actually has data to send it would reset the keep alive to be 30 seconds after the last transmission. The status could be helpful to see if the client is still alive anyway, so at least it can be a useful ping.
Also, you should change your server code, you appear to only handle one connection at the moment. You should loop and when a socket connection comes in spawn a thread to handle the client request and go back to listening. I may be reading to much into what may just be your test code, though.
Make the client socket connection wrapped around a thread. Use a blocking queue to wait for messages. There should only be a single sender queue throughout your application, so use a singleton pattern.
e.g.
QueueSingleton queue = QueueSingleton.getSenderQueue();
Message message = queue.take() // blocks thread
send(message); //send message to server
When you need to send a message to the server, you can use the blocking queue to send the message.
QueueSingleton queue = QueueSingleton.getSenderQueue();
queue.put(message)
The client thread will wake up and process the message.
For maintaining the connection, use a timer task. This is special type of thread that calls a run method repetitively at specified periods. You can use this to post a message, a ping message, every so often.
For processing the received message, you could have another thread, waiting for messages on another blocking queue (receiver queue). The client thread will put the received message on this queue.
I have a 2 nodes that should always communicate with each other, but they don't seem to talk for more than 1 interaction. After successfully sending and receiving 1 message, they stop.
My code looks like this:
The initiator:
try {
Socket client = new Socket(ip, port);
OutputStream toNode = client.getOutputStream();
DataOutputStream out = new DataOutputStream(toNode);
out.writeUTF("Start:Message");
System.out.println("Sent data");
InputStream fromNode = client.getInputStream();
DataInputStream in = new DataInputStream(fromNode);
if(in.readUTF().equals("Return Message")) {
System.out.println("Received data");
out.writeUTF("Main:Message");
System.out.println("Sent data again");
}
else
System.out.println("Error");
client.close();
} catch (UnknownHostException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
} catch (IOException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
The responder:
while(true) {
Socket server;
try {
server = s.accept();
DataInputStream in = new DataInputStream(server.getInputStream());
String msg = in.readUTF();
String[] broken_msg = msg.split(":");
if(broken_msg.length > 0)
System.out.println("Looping");
String ret;
if (broken[0].equalsIgnoreCase("Start")) {
ret = "Return Message";
DataOutputStream out = new DataOutputStream(server.getOutputStream());
out.writeUTF(ret);
}
else if (broken[0].equalsIgnoreCase("Main")) {
//Do Useful work
}
} catch (IOException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
My output looks like this:
Looping
and:
Sent data
Received data
Sent data again
You are looping around the accept() call, accepting new connections, but your actual I/O code only reads one message per connection. You need an inner loop around the readUTF() calls, handling the entire connection until EOFException is thrown. Normally all the I/O for a connection is handled in a separate thread.
In order for programs to do repetitive actions, you would generally use looping of some sort, including for loops, while loops and do-while loops. For something like this where you don't know how many times you'd need to communicate in advance, then you would need to use a while loop, not a for loop.
Having said that, you have no while loops whatsoever inside of your connection code... so without code that would allow continued communication, your program will stop, exactly as you've programmed it to do.
Solution: fix this. Put in while loops where continued communication is needed.
I have a method which takes an IP, receives data and stores it in a List. At the end of the method it returns this List. However when this method is called, the list is empty. I think it is a really simple fix and it's me being stupid but could anyone point me to where I have gone wrong so I dont do it again?
public List<String> receiveDataFromOperator(){
List<String> dataRec = new ArrayList<String>();
try
{
System.out.println("Client Program");
//Hard coded IP Address
String ip = "146.176.226.147";
//Hard coded port
int port = 500;
// Connect to the server
Socket sock = new Socket(ip, port);
// Create the incoming stream to read messages from
DataInputStream network = new DataInputStream(sock.getInputStream());
// Display our address
System.out.println("Address: " + sock.getInetAddress());
String line;
// Loop until the connection closes, reading from the network
while ((line = network.readUTF()) != null)
{
dataRec.add(line);
}
sock.close();
}
catch (IOException ioe)
{
//Test output for the arraylist size
System.out.println(dataRec.size());
for(int i = 0; i<dataRec.size(); i++){
System.out.println("Line " + i + dataRec.get(i) + "\n");
}
}// End of catch
return dataRec;
}//End of method
If the server is writing binary data with DataOutputStream.writeUTF() it should work.
If you are sending text from the server you need to read text from the socket with BufferedReader.readLine().
BTW: When you get an IOException you generally shouldn't ignore it and pretend it didn't happen esp. when the program is not behaving as you expect.
i have a java client-server app in java, both using the same connection class that contains both send/receive messages.
for some reason, some of the messages i send are received in a malformed order:
here's the code
//set up
_in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(this._socket.getInputStream()));
_out = new BufferedWriter(new OutputStreamWriter(this._socket.getOutputStream()));
this._socket.setSoTimeout(S_TIMEOUT);
public synchronized boolean send(String message){
try {
_out.write(message);
_out.write(Connection.DELIMITER);
_out.flush();
return true;
} catch (IOException e) {
}
return false;
}
public String receive(){
int c;
try {
String message = "";
System.out.println("Getting message:");
c = _in.read();
while(c != -1 && c != Connection.DELIMITER) {
message += (char) c;
c = _in.read();
}
if (c == -1) {
return null;
}
return message;
} catch (IOException e) { }
return null;
}
some messages, for example "new_order" will might return with "ew_ord".
some characters are lost, others are sent separately. this seems odd as its TCP
could this be an encoding related issue?
Delimiter is (char) 0
socket timeout is 20000 (ie 20 senconds). every 10 seconds i send an empty message to make sure socket does not close
EDIT:
although it was solved using the Scanner, i must say that the original code worked fine for many messages/various machines for a very long time (a few weeks), and then suddenly failed to work with one specific message on one specific machine (other messages went through just fine). i've done socket data transfer in java MANY times and i've written many read/write methods to handle the sockets. it's the first time i ran into this.
although in the original code i set the encoding (in the posted code i didn't), i believe that the problem was encoding related. at one point, the message that was received had every second character missing. afterwards i changed it a bit, and the first/second character of the message were received in a separate message. from my understanding, it's either an encoding issue or some firewall/other security program that was running on the message sender machine, that decided to filter outgoing packets.
Try replacing your receive with a Scanner and let it do the work for you.
// in your setup
Scanner sc = new Scanner(_in).useDelimiter(Connection.DELIMETER);
public String receive() {
try {
return sc.next();
} catch(IOException e) {
return "";
}
}
For starters, I would make sure you're printing exceptions in those catch blocks.
Then, you're using the platform default encoding for converting characters to bytes. If these two processes are running on different machines, it's possible they're using different encodings. I would make sure you're specifying an encoding when you set up the Reader and Writer.
You can use UTF encoding for getting Full String of Message.
U can try this code and I am Sure About this code because i used it in My Chat Application.
String data=" ";
socket = new Socket("localhost",999);
while(true)
{
dos = new DataOutputStream(socket.getOutputStream());
dis = new DataInputStream(socket.getInputStream());
data = dis.readUTF();
jta.append(data +"\n");
}
Where jta is JTextArea.
It's for Client Side
Now For Server Side:
try
{
server = new ServerSocket(999);
Socket soc = server.accept();
while(true)
{
String data="";
try
{
dis = new DataInputStream(soc.getInputStream());
dos = new DataOutputStream(soc.getOutputStream());
data = dis.readUTF();
}
catch(Exception e)
{ }
jta.append(data + "\n");
}
}
catch (IOException e)
{
JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(this, e);
System.exit(-1);
}
I have written a server is java here is the code:
public mainClass()
{
try
{
ss = new ServerSocket(8080);
while (true)
{
socket = ss.accept();
System.out.println("It is accept!");
in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(socket.getInputStream()));
//out = new PrintWriter(socket.getOutputStream(),true);
line = in.readLine();
System.out.println("you input is :" + line);
//out.close();
in.close();
socket.close();
}
}
catch (IOException e)
{
}
and I am using an iPhone application as the client.
now what my problem is that the server is not reading the inputstream while the appication is running on the iphone.. But as soon as the application is terminated the java program prints out the String which has been sent to the server..Not sure what is happening here..sorry if this is not a good question..
- (void)viewDidLoad {
[super viewDidLoad];
socket = [[LXSocket alloc]init];
if ([socket connect:#"10.211.55.2" port:8080]) {
NSLog(#"socket has been created");
}
else {
NSLog(#"socket couldn't be created created");
}
#try {
[socket sendString:#"Hi This is a second test"];
}
#catch (NSException * e) {
NSLog(#"Unable to send data");
}
[super viewDidLoad];
}
thanks,
TC
From my own experience, readLine is not a good idea, especially when working with different languages and platforms, a better approach will be to use InputStreamReader and its read(char[] buff) method, and agree on both sides regarding the length to be sent each time.
Again, I have no reference to that, only my experience.
Also, looking at your code, you send a string without a new line character: [socket sendString:#"Hi This is a second test"]; maybe adding \n at the end will solve it for you.
My guess is that the client application doesn't send any line break at the end of the string it sends. So BufferedReader.readLine() waits for an EOL character, and only returns the string when the client application ends, because at this point the connection is closed and the reader knows there won't ever be an EOL, and the string is the last line it will ever receive.
BufferedReader can be dangerous; the buffering can cause short lines to get "stuck" if you're only reading a little data at a time, or if the data is coming across a network. If you're only using BufferedReader to get readLine(), then do this:
new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(socket.getInputStream()), 1);
That extra argument sets the buffer size to 1 character, effectively turning it off. That generally solves this kind of problem.