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Receiving data from multiple sockets at once (Multithreading)

I'm new at network programming and i have been searching for a solution to my problem here but couldn't find one. What I want is to have a server that can receive files from multiple sockets at the same time. When a server accepts new connection socket it wraps that socket with a ClientThread class. Here is the code:
public class Server extends Thread {
private ServerSocket server;
private Vector<ClientThread> clients;
#Override
public void run() {
listen();
}
private void listen() {
new Thread("Listening Thread") {
#Override
public void run() {
while (true) {
try {
Socket socket = server.accept();
ClientThread newClient = new ClientThread(socket);
newClient.start();
clients.addElement(newClient);
} catch (IOException | ClassNotFoundException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
}
}.start();
}
ClientThread is a private class inside the Server class. It's always listening for an Object from ObjectInputStream, but also I want to be able to receive one big file after the object. And that is why I think i should use multithreading. Here is the code:
private class ClientThread extends Thread {
public Socket socket;
private boolean loggedIn;
private ObjectInputStream ois;
private BufferedInputStream bis;
public ClientThread(Socket socket) {
this.socket = socket;
loggedIn = true;
InputStream is = socket.getInputStream();
ois = new ObjectInputStream(is);
bis = new BufferedInputStream(is);
}
#Override
public void run() {
receive();
}
private void receive() {
while (loggedIn) {
try {
// this method blocks i guess
Object object = ois.readObject();
// after the object comes the large file
byte[] bytes = new byte[SOME_SIZE];
int bytesRead;
int totalRead = 0;
// reading the large file into memory
while ((bytesRead = bis.read(bytes, totalRead, bytes.length - totalRead)) > -1) {
totalRead += bytesRead;
}
// rest of the code for handling received bytes.......
} catch (ClassNotFoundException | IOException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
}
}
I'm not sure if receiving data like this is even possible since all these client sockets are sending data to the same port on this server (i guess?). And if clients are sending data at the same time, Server needs to know which data is for which client. Is this already taken care of, or i need entirely different approach here?
I don't know if this is a stupid question, but like I said I'm just starting learning this stuff. Also i couldn't test my program because i don't even have code for the Client yet. Just want to make sure I don't go wrong at the very start. If this is wrong, feel free to post some ideas. :) Thanks!

For a start it's not bad :)
You can improve later on by using a Selector but that's another topic.
Some clarifications though: the ServerSocket listens on a specific port. When a remote client connects to it, a communication channel (i.e. socket) is created. If another client connects, another socket is created. Both sockets are different channels and won't interfere with each other because they are connected to a different remote IP and port.
It all has to do with how TCP headers and IP headers are formed: a TCP data packet is sent with its header containing the source and destination port, on top of IP header containing the source and destination IP. Those are used to discriminate between the different sockets.
Regarding the "broadcast" you want to do (as per your comment in #Rajesh's answer), you have options:
Do it yourself in pure TCP with ServerSocket and Socket like you started
Switch to UDP and use MulticastSocket, which has the advantage of issueing a single send, but you'll have to deal with missing/unordered datagrams in your client code (UDP does not guarantee delivery or ordering, like TCP does)
Check NIO with Selector and SocketChannel
Investigate frameworks like jGroups or Netty which do the I/O stuff for you
As you're learning, I suggest you do that in the above order. Using a framework is nice, but going through coding yourself will teach you a lot more.

This will work functionally. Each thread is reading from a separate socket connected to different client (address + port). They are separate streams, so no issues in reading from that like this.
However it would be much better to use asynchronous sockets.
Few things that can be taken care in the current implementation:
1) As a good practice, close the streams/sockets when transfer is complete.
2) For every new connection, a new thread is created. That will not scale. Even some one can send many requests and bring down your app. Would be better to use a thread pool. "ClientThread" can just implement "Runnable" and when a new connection is received, just submit the new "ClientThread" to thread pool. (In this case, would be better to name it as ClientTask instead of ClientThread)
As mentioned, it would be much more efficient and scalable to use asynchronous socket, but it will take some time master it. With this, you can use just one thread to read all sockets in parallel and depending on load, can use the same thread or a pool of threads to process the data received from all the sockets. Note that, even if use a pool, you will not need separate thread for processing each socket...Just to make best use of multiple CPU Cores, can use multiple threads to process the data.
You may try either java nio (Selector + SocketChannels) or netty library. Netty is much easier to use compared to nio.

What will happen if two clients send request simultaneously to a ServerSocket that is using a while loop to accept requests

I've two clients on two different machines and I don't know when they're gonna send requests.
is this the scenario where I HAVE TO use Selector and ServerSocketChannel?
Example:
public class Server{
public static void main(String[] args) {
try(
ServerSocket serverSocket = new ServerSocket(1234)
){
while(true) {
serverSocket.accept();
Thread.sleep(5*1000);
//and while its sleeping, second client sends request
}
}catch(Exception e){}
}
}

is this the scenario where I HAVE TO use Selector and ServerSocketChannel?
Nope. A more common solution is to have one thread per client - when you accept a call, create a new thread (or use an existing one from a thread-pool) and use that to handle that connection. The original thread calls accept again (immediately - no sleep required) and spawns a new thread for the next connection, etc.
(There are certainly advantages to asynchronous IO, but you're not forced to use it.)

You dont have to use Selector / ServerSocketChannel.
Instead for a very simple server - you could simply start a new thread to handle the client connection. See Supporting Multiple Clients for an example on how to do this with a new thread per client.

How to setup server-client communication using Telnet via a NetManager class

We're working on a school project where we have to use Telnet (Yes, I know, we shouldn't use it etc., but we have to) to communicate between a server and a client. We have two classes setup, a server and a client, which is a thread. We called our client 'NetManager', it can send and receive messages.
However, we have other classes as well which need to send messages to the server, and handle the output the server returns. We want to do this via the NetManager, instead of setting up a new Thread and socket for each class individually.
However, we do not know how to do this. Ideally we want to have a while(working) { } in our NetManager class which reads the lines the server sends, but we also need to send messages inside the while loop. The messages needs to vary so simply putting them in the while loop won't work. Is there a way to do server-client communication, where multiple classes use the NetManager class to send and receive messages from a server?
I have included a stripped down version of our NetManager class below for reference. This version only reads lines sent by the server, it does not yet send messages (which could be accomplished with out.println();
.
public class NetManager extends Thread {
private BufferedReader in;
private BufferedReader stdIn;
private PrintWriter out;
private String line;
#Override
public void run() {
boolean working = true;
try {
Socket sock = new Socket("localhost", 7789);
out = new PrintWriter(sock.getOutputStream(), true);
in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(sock.getInputStream()));
} catch (IOException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
while (working) {
try {
line = in.readLine();
System.out.println(line);
} catch (Exception e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
}
}
Here is a quick scheme I made of the best case scenario:

While I think your design is a good one I also think it may be overly complicated for what you are trying to do. If multiple classes are going to be using the same NetManager instance then you are going to have to implement some sort of locking and/or queuing so only one class tries to access NetManager at a time. Then you will also have to figure out some way to make sure any response received by NetManager gets back to the appropriate caller.
Having said all that, I would have any classes that use NetManager accept an instance of it in the constructor. It would then save a reference to the object and use it as necessary.

Expanding my Java program to send a alert message to other computers

I've written a java intake program that send an PDF-formatted intake to a shared folder so that other people in the network can read it. However, there is not a way for the other people to know that an intake was sent unless someone tells them, so I want the program to send an alert message to the other computers telling them that an intake has been sent.
Now I've done some research into this and figured that TCP is the way to go since it's reliable. I also know that this is a one-to-many sending going on, so I assume that my Intake program will act as the server an the other computers will be the client, or should it be the other way around?
Now I assume that I have to create a client program that listens to the server and waits for it to send a message.
With that in mind, how do I:
Create a client program that listens for the message continuously until the program is closed. I assume that I'll be using "while (true)" and sleep. If so, how long do I put the program to sleep?
Make it as part of Windows service so that can load up when Windows start.
On the server end, how do I:
Send messages to more than one computer, since TCP is not capable of multicasting or broadcasting. I assume an array/vector will play a part here.
Oh, this is a one-way communication. The client doesn't have to respond back to the server.

First of all, UDP is quite reliable (in fact, as reliable as the IP protocol itself). TCP simply ensures that the data was received which involved quite a lot of magic in the back end. Unless you absolutely need to be sure that other machines got the message, you could do it with UDP. Mind that I'm not saying “Don't use TCP”, I just want to make it straight that you should take UDP into consideration as well.
Anyway, yes, you can create a simple listening program. Here is an example of a client in Java that reads messages from the server. It overrides the run method of a Thread class:
public void run() {
try {
String messageFromServer = reader.readLine();
while (messageFromServer != null) {
// Do things with messageFromServer here
// processor.processFromServer(messageFromServer);
messageFromServer = reader.readLine(); // Blocks the loop, waits for message
}
}
catch (IOException e) {
// Handle your exception
}
}
Amongst other things, my thread was set up as such:
public CommunicationThread(String hostname, int port, int timeout) throws IOException, SocketTimeoutException {
InetSocketAddress address = new InetSocketAddress(hostname, port);
socket = new Socket();
socket.connect(address, 2000); // 2000ms time out
// You can use the writer to write messages back out to the server
writer = new BufferedWriter(new OutputStreamWriter(socket.getOutputStream()));
reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(socket.getInputStream()));
}
Now, regards to server-side you can do something as follows:
Write a program to allow clients to contact, given that they know your address.
Accept the connections, and store the sockets in a list.
When you need to send out a message, traverse the list and send the data to everyone on it.
You can start listening on your server with
this.socket = new ServerSocket(port);
You could (or even should(?)) make it threaded so that you can accept clients while serving others. You can accept new clients with:
socket.accept(); // Blocks, waiting for someone to connect, returns open socket
Feel free to pass that to a whole new class which can deal with BufferedWriter (and maybe even BufferedReader if you want to read from clients as well). That class is where you would implement things such as writeToClient(message)
Consider the situation where you have a ClientConnection class that has writeToClient(String s) method and (Server server, Socket socket) and initialized ArrayList conList.
Here is how you would follow:
In a separate thread in Server, accept connections with
ClientConnection con = new ClientConnection(this, socket.accept());
conList.add(con);
Then, when you want to write to clients:
for (ClientConnection c : conList) {
c.writeToClient("I'm sending you a message!");
}
I hope you get a vague idea of what you need to do. Read the Socket documentation, it's very useful. Also, as always with threaded applications, make sure you aren't doing things such as modifying a list while traversing it and avoid race conditions.
Good luck!

Non-blocking sockets

What's the best way to implement a non-blocking socket in Java?
Or is there such a thing? I have a program that communicates with a server through socket but I don't want the socket call to block/cause delay if there is a problem with the data/connection.

Java non-blocking socket was introduced in Java 2 Standard Edition 1.4. It allows net communication between applications using the sockets without blocking the processes. But Teo, what a non-blocking socket is?, in which contexts it can be useful?, and how it works? Okay young Padawan lets answer this questions.
What a non-blocking socket is?
A non-blocking socket allows I/O operation on a channel without blocking the processes using it. This means, we can use a single thread to handle multiple concurrent connections and gain an "asynchronous high-performance" read/write operations (some people may not agreed with that)
Ok, in which contexts it can be useful?
Suppose you would like to implement a server accepting diverse client connections. Suppose, as well, that you would like the server to be able to process multiple requests simultaneously. Using the traditional way you have two choices to develop such a server:
a. Implement a multi-thread server that manually handles a thread for each connection.
b. Using an external third-party module.
Both solutions work, but adopting the first one you have to develop the whole thread-management solution, with related concurrency and conflict troubles. The second solution makes the application dependent on a non-JDK external module and probably you have to adapt the library to your necessities. By means of the non-blocking socket, you can implement a non-blocking server without directly managing threads or resorting to external modules.
How it works?
Before going into details, there are few terms that you need to understand:
In NIO based implementations, instead of writing data onto output streams and reading data from input streams, we read and write data from buffers. A buffer can be defined as a temporary storage.
Channel transports bulk of data into and out of buffers. Also, it can be viewed as an endpoint for communication.
Readiness Selection is a concept that refers to “the ability to choose a socket that will not block when data is read or written.”
Java NIO has a class called Selector that allows a single thread to examine I/O events on multiple channels. How is this possible? Well, the selector can check the "readiness" of a channel for events such as a client attempting a connection, or a read/write operation. This is, each instance of Selector can monitor more socket channels and thus more connections. Now, when something happens on the channel (an event occurs), the selector informs the application to process the request. The selector does it by creating event keys (or selection keys), which are instances of the SelectionKey class. Each key holds information about who is making the request and what type of the request is, as shown in the Figure 1.
Figure 1: Structure diagram
A basic implementation
A server implementation consists of an infinite loop in which the selector waits for events and creates the event keys. There are four possible types for a key:
Acceptable: the associated client requests a connection.
Connectable: the server accepted the connection.
Readable: the server can read.
Writeable: the server can write.
Usually acceptable keys are created on the server side. In fact, this kind of key simply informs the server that a client required a connection, then the server individuates the socket channel and associates this to the selector for read/write operations. After this, when the accepted client reads or writes something, the selector will create readable or writeable keys for that client..
Now you are ready to write the server in Java, following the proposed algorithm. The creation of the socket channel, the selector, and the socket-selector registration can be made in this way:
final String HOSTNAME = "127.0.0.1";
final int PORT = 8511;
// This is how you open a ServerSocketChannel
serverChannel = ServerSocketChannel.open();
// You MUST configure as non-blocking or else you cannot register the serverChannel to the Selector.
serverChannel.configureBlocking(false);
// bind to the address that you will use to Serve.
serverChannel.socket().bind(new InetSocketAddress(HOSTNAME, PORT));
// This is how you open a Selector
selector = Selector.open();
/*
* Here you are registering the serverSocketChannel to accept connection, thus the OP_ACCEPT.
* This means that you just told your selector that this channel will be used to accept connections.
* We can change this operation later to read/write, more on this later.
*/
serverChannel.register(selector, SelectionKey.OP_ACCEPT);
First we create an instance of SocketChannel with ServerSocketChannel.open() method. Next, configureBlocking(false) invocation sets this channel as nonblocking. The connection to the server is made by serverChannel.socket().bind() method. The HOSTNAME represents the IP address of the server, and PORT is the communication port. Finally, invoke Selector.open() method to create a selector instance and register it to the channel and registration type. In this example, the registration type is OP_ACCEPT, which means the selector merely reports that a client attempts a connection to the server. Other possible options are: OP_CONNECT, which will be used by the client; OP_READ; and OP_WRITE.
Now we need to handle this requests using an infinite loop. A simple way is the following:
// Run the server as long as the thread is not interrupted.
while (!Thread.currentThread().isInterrupted()) {
/*
* selector.select(TIMEOUT) is waiting for an OPERATION to be ready and is a blocking call.
* For example, if a client connects right this second, then it will break from the select()
* call and run the code below it. The TIMEOUT is not needed, but its just so it doesn't
* block undefinable.
*/
selector.select(TIMEOUT);
/*
* If we are here, it is because an operation happened (or the TIMEOUT expired).
* We need to get the SelectionKeys from the selector to see what operations are available.
* We use an iterator for this.
*/
Iterator<SelectionKey> keys = selector.selectedKeys().iterator();
while (keys.hasNext()) {
SelectionKey key = keys.next();
// remove the key so that we don't process this OPERATION again.
keys.remove();
// key could be invalid if for example, the client closed the connection.
if (!key.isValid()) {
continue;
}
/*
* In the server, we start by listening to the OP_ACCEPT when we register with the Selector.
* If the key from the keyset is Acceptable, then we must get ready to accept the client
* connection and do something with it. Go read the comments in the accept method.
*/
if (key.isAcceptable()) {
System.out.println("Accepting connection");
accept(key);
}
/*
* If you already read the comments in the accept() method, then you know we changed
* the OPERATION to OP_WRITE. This means that one of these keys in the iterator will return
* a channel that is writable (key.isWritable()). The write() method will explain further.
*/
if (key.isWritable()) {
System.out.println("Writing...");
write(key);
}
/*
* If you already read the comments in the write method then you understand that we registered
* the OPERATION OP_READ. That means that on the next Selector.select(), there is probably a key
* that is ready to read (key.isReadable()). The read() method will explain further.
*/
if (key.isReadable()) {
System.out.println("Reading connection");
read(key);
}
}
}
You can find the implementation source here
NOTE: Asynchronous Server
An alternative to the the Non-blocking implementation we can deploy an Asynchronous Server. For instance, you can use the AsynchronousServerSocketChannel class, which provides an asynchronous channel for stream-oriented listening sockets.
To use it, first execute its static open() method and then bind() it to a specific port. Next, you'll execute its accept() method, passing to it a class that implements the CompletionHandler interface. Most often, you'll find that handler created as an anonymous inner class.
From this AsynchronousServerSocketChannel object, you invoke accept() to tell it to start listening for connections, passing to it a custom CompletionHandler instance. When we invoke accept(), it returns immediately. Note that this is different from the traditional blocking approach; whereas the accept() method blocked until a client connected to it, the AsynchronousServerSocketChannel accept() method handles it for you.
Here you have an example:
public class NioSocketServer
{
public NioSocketServer()
{
try {
// Create an AsynchronousServerSocketChannel that will listen on port 5000
final AsynchronousServerSocketChannel listener = AsynchronousServerSocketChannel
.open()
.bind(new InetSocketAddress(5000));
// Listen for a new request
listener.accept(null, new CompletionHandler<AsynchronousSocketChannel, Void>()
{
#Override
public void completed(AsynchronousSocketChannel ch, Void att)
{
// Accept the next connection
listener.accept(null, this);
// Greet the client
ch.write(ByteBuffer.wrap("Hello, I am Echo Server 2020, let's have an engaging conversation!\n".getBytes()));
// Allocate a byte buffer (4K) to read from the client
ByteBuffer byteBuffer = ByteBuffer.allocate(4096);
try {
// Read the first line
int bytesRead = ch.read(byteBuffer).get(20, TimeUnit.SECONDS);
boolean running = true;
while (bytesRead != -1 && running) {
System.out.println("bytes read: " + bytesRead);
// Make sure that we have data to read
if (byteBuffer.position() > 2) {
// Make the buffer ready to read
byteBuffer.flip();
// Convert the buffer into a line
byte[] lineBytes = new byte[bytesRead];
byteBuffer.get(lineBytes, 0, bytesRead);
String line = new String(lineBytes);
// Debug
System.out.println("Message: " + line);
// Echo back to the caller
ch.write(ByteBuffer.wrap(line.getBytes()));
// Make the buffer ready to write
byteBuffer.clear();
// Read the next line
bytesRead = ch.read(byteBuffer).get(20, TimeUnit.SECONDS);
} else {
// An empty line signifies the end of the conversation in our protocol
running = false;
}
}
} catch (InterruptedException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
} catch (ExecutionException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
} catch (TimeoutException e) {
// The user exceeded the 20 second timeout, so close the connection
ch.write(ByteBuffer.wrap("Good Bye\n".getBytes()));
System.out.println("Connection timed out, closing connection");
}
System.out.println("End of conversation");
try {
// Close the connection if we need to
if (ch.isOpen()) {
ch.close();
}
} catch (I/OException e1)
{
e1.printStackTrace();
}
}
#Override
public void failed(Throwable exc, Void att)
{
///...
}
});
} catch (I/OException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
public static void main(String[] args)
{
NioSocketServer server = new NioSocketServer();
try {
Thread.sleep(60000);
} catch (Exception e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
}
You can find the full code here

What's the best way to implement a non-blocking socket in Java?
There is only one way. SocketChannel.configureBlocking(false).
Note that several of these answers are incorrect. SocketChannel.configureBlocking(false) puts it into non-blocking mode. You don't need a Selector to do that. You only need a Selector to implement timeouts or multiplexed I/O with non-blocking sockets.

Apart from using non blocking IO, you might find it is much simpler to have a writing thread for your connection.
Note: if you only need a few thousand connections, one to two threads per connection is simpler. If you have around ten thousand or more connections per server you need NIO with Selectors.

java.nio package provides Selector working much like as in C.

I just wrote this code . It works well . This is an example of the Java NIO as mentioned in the above answers but here i post the code .
ServerSocketChannel ssc = null;
try {
ssc = ServerSocketChannel.open();
ssc.socket().bind(new InetSocketAddress(port));
ssc.configureBlocking(false);
while (true) {
SocketChannel sc = ssc.accept();
if (sc == null) {
// No connections came .
} else {
// You got a connection. Do something
}
}
} catch (IOException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}