Java Network Programming

This is the best and most up-to-date book to focus specifically on the Java platform's networking abilities, in all their various forms. Providing a thorough grounding in and complete reference to the Java technologies fundamental to network programming, with a specific focus on streams, the book then proceeds to detail how to implement robust, real-world Java-based networking applications.

The book begins with the most thorough documentation available on Java streams, covering not only the concept behind and API of streams but also, more importantly, how to customize and extend the streams for your own purposes. All the standard Java streams are covered, including byte streams, character streams and the object streams. The importance of streams is stressed throughout the book, with later customized streams for parsing DNS records, HTTP requests, sending HTTP responses, etc.

In the subsequent networking chapters, the book proceeds to cover the foundational TCP/IP and UDP/IP networking protocols in depth, with full examples of network clients and servers including a DNS client, finger client, Web server and various chat systems, among others. It then details how to use multicast for efficient multiparty communications, and provides extensive details on the Java URL API including two custom URL frameworks for accessing various Internet protocols.

Following this is a thorough description if the RMI, CORBA and Servlet networking APIs, and how these can be used to develop distributed and Web-based network systems. As a yardstick for comparing the different technologies, an example of a distributed list datastructure is implemented thrice, with sockets, RMI and servlets.

Finally, the book wraps up by combining custom streams and networking into a comprehensive example of developing message streams that allow multiple networked applications to be seamlessly and transparently multiplexed down a single network connection, while automatically hiding problems such as network delays or even failures.

What is perhaps most impressive about this book is the wealth of up-to-date, real-world applications provided, showing how to properly develop extensible network systems using the Java 2 platform. These applications go far beyond the simple examples of other texts available, demonstrating how to effectively harness Java's different APIs into coherent, complex systems. Source for the examples is available online at the author's Website (http://nitric.com/jnp/).

Table of contents

Preface

Preface to the first edition

Acknowledgments

Guide to the reader

About the cover illustration

Part I: Preliminaries

Chapter 1: Introduction to networking

Chapter 2: The Java security model

Chapter 3: An overview of exceptions

Chapter 4: An overview of multithreading

Part II: Streams

Chapter 5: An introduction to streams

Chapter 6: File access through streams

Chapter 7: Extending streams with filters

Chapter 8: Supplied stream filters

Chapter 9: Memory I/O streams

Chapter 10: Character streams

Chapter 11: Character stream filters

Chapter 12: Memory-based character streams

Chapter 13: Object streams

Part III: Networking

Chapter 14: Client-side networking

Chapter 15: Some example TCP/IP clients

Chapter 16: Server-side networking

Chapter 17: Building a Web server

Chapter 18: Client/server Internet applications

Chapter 19: The URL classes

Chapter 20: Datagram networking

Chapter 21: Some datagram applications

Chapter 22: Multicast networking

Part IV: Alternative technologies

Chapter 23: Remote method invocation

Chapter 24: RMI in practice

Chapter 25: CORBA

Chapter 26: Servlets

Chapter 27: Servlets in practice

Part V: Message streams

Chapter 28: Message streams

Chapter 29: Queuing message streams

Chapter 30: Multiplexing message streams

Chapter 31: Routing message streams

Chapter 32: A generic message server

Chapter 33: Building a generic client

Appendices

Appendix A: Networking

Appendix B: Tables

index