Networking

CHAPTER 22 

Networking

As all readers know, Java is practically a synonym for Internet programming. There are a number of reasons for this, not the least of which is its ability to generate secure, cross-platform, portable code. However, one of the most important reasons that Java is the premier language for network programming are the classes defined in the java.net package. They provide an easy-to-use means by which programmers of all skill levels can access network resources.

This chapter explores the java.net package. It is important to emphasize that networking is a very large and at times complicated topic. It is not possible for this book to discuss all of the capabilities contained in java.net. Instead, this chapter focuses on several of its core classes and interfaces.

Networking Basics

Before we begin, it will be useful to review some key networking concepts and terms. At the core of Java’s networking support is the concept of a socket. A socket identifies an endpoint in a network. The socket paradigm was part of the 4.2BSD Berkeley UNIX release in the early 1980s. Because of this, the term Berkeley socket is also used. Sockets are at the foundation of modern networking because a socket allows a single computer to serve many different clients at once, as well as to serve many different types of information. This is accomplished through the use of a port, which is a numbered socket on a particular machine. A server process is said to "listen" to a port until a client connects to it. A server is allowed to accept multiple clients connected to the same port number, although each session is unique. To manage multiple client connections, a server process must be multithreaded or have some other means of multiplexing the simultaneous I/O.

Socket communication takes place via a protocol. Internet Protocol (IP) is a low-level routing protocol that breaks data into small packets and sends them to an address across a network, which does not guarantee to deliver said packets to the destination. Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is a higher-level protocol that manages to robustly string together these packets, sorting and retransmitting them as necessary to reliably transmit data. A third protocol, User Datagram Protocol (UDP), sits next to TCP and can be used directly to support fast, connectionless, unreliable transport of packets.

Once a connection has been established, a higher-level protocol ensues, which is dependent on which port you are using. TCP/IP reserves the lower 1,024 ports for specific protocols. Many of these will seem familiar to you if you have spent any time surfing the Internet. Port number 21 is for FTP; 23 is for Telnet; 25 is for e-mail; 43 is for whois; 80 is for HTTP; 119 is for netnews—and the list goes on. It is up to each protocol to determine how a client should interact with the port.

For example, HTTP is the protocol that web browsers and servers use to transfer hypertext pages and images. It is a quite simple protocol for a basic page-browsing web server. Here’s how it works. When a client requests a file from an HTTP server, an action known as a hit, it simply sends the name of the file in a special format to a predefined port and reads back the contents of the file. The server also responds with a status code to tell the client whether or not the request can be fulfilled and why.

A key component of the Internet is the address. Every computer on the Internet has one. An Internet address is a number that uniquely identifies each computer on the Net. Originally, all Internet addresses consisted of 32-bit values, organized as four 8-bit values. This address type was specified by IPv4 (Internet Protocol, version 4). However, a new addressing scheme, called IPv6 (Internet Protocol, version 6) has come into play. IPv6 uses a 128-bit value to represent an address, organized into eight 16-bit chunks. Although there are several reasons for and advantages to IPv6, the main one is that it supports a much larger address space than does IPv4. Fortunately, when using Java, you won’t normally need to worry about whether IPv4 or IPv6 addresses are used because Java handles the details for you.

Just as the numbers of an IP address describe a network hierarchy, the name of an Internet address, called its domain name, describes a machine’s location in a name space. For example, www.HerbSchildt.com is in the COM top-level domain (reserved for U.S. commercial sites); it is called HerbSchildt, and www identifies the server for web requests. An Internet domain name is mapped to an IP address by the Domain Naming Service (DNS). This enables users to work with domain names, but the Internet operates on IP addresses.