I am attempting to write a client/server program where the client can:
*Write a string to server
*Receive an Object from server
and the server can:
*Receive a string from a client
*Send an object to the client.
However, my attempts so far have proved fruitless and I am quite frustrated. I am sure I am making a fundamental flaw, but being so new to Socket programming I just cannot see where I am going wrong.
Is there anything wrong with my choice of streams, or is there a better way of using streams which I have not picked up on?
The object I am sending is serialised, although the object is never written/read as the server hangs on the readUTF()
Thank you in advance for any help.
//Used to receive a string input from client side
DataInputStream input = new DataInputStream(clientSocket.getInputStream());
// Used to output an object to client side
ObjectOutputStream oo = new ObjectOutputStream(clientSocket.getOutputStream());
// This is never executed..
clientInput = input.readUTF();
oo.writeObject(book);
Client Side code:
// Used to read object from server side
input = new ObjectInputStream(clientSocket.getInputStream());
// Used to read input from command line
keyboard = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(System.in));
// Used to send string to server
output = new DataOutputStream(clientSocket.getOutputStream());
cmdInput = keyboard.readLine();
// Write to server, this executes at runtime.
output.writeUTF(cmdInput);
// Object is never sent, this line is not executed.
book = (Book)input.readObject();
In general, you would be better off using a web service kit (e.g. Apache CXF) than doing this yourself.
In specific, try calling flush() on your output stream in the client.
Related
I'm writing a small MUD style game in Scala. I want to allow users to telnet in to the game (just like in the old days). This really is just a game. It's going to run on a private network. Security is not (yet) a consideration.
The "protocol" consists of lines of text (terminated with CR) sent by the user. The server will reply with lines of text of it's own before waiting for the next line of user's input. In effect this is a REPL style text interface.
Is there a handy library that will do the networking stuff for me? I just want it to open up a port and allow users to connect to the service and start sending and receiving text from the game.
There are plenty of full-featured server libraries (e.g. TwitterServer) which seem to be geared towards Thrift and HTTP. I'm actually after something much simpler. I just want to receive lines of text, and respond with lines of text.
Any ideas about how I might be able to achieve this with the greatest possible simplicity?
Here you go:
val acceptor = new ServerSocket(port)
while(true) {
val socket = acceptor.accept
Future { serve(socket.getInputStream, socket.getOutputStream) } onComplete { socket.close() }
}
I having the following code to create a client socket to send/receive data:
val socket:Socket = new Socket(InetAddress.getByName("127.0.0.1"), 7777)
val inputStream = socket.getInputStream()
val bufferSource = new BufferedSource(inputStream)
val out = new PrintStream(socket.getOutputStream())
var data = "Hello Everyone"
out.println(data)
out.flush()
***socket.shutdownOutput()***
val in = bufferSource.getLines()
if (in.hasNext) {
println(in.next())
}
If I don't run socket.shutdownOutput(), I won't get the data from server,
because Server side is still waiting the input. Therefore I have to shutdown the outputStream.
But if shutdown the output, it can not be reopen. So I have to create a new socket for sending new data.
That caused sending one record needs to create a new socket. This is really awkward.
Is there any other way to tell the server that the output already finished without shutting down the output please.
Thanks in advance!
The problem is that the server doesn't know when to stop reading and process and reply.
What you need here is an application-level protocol that would dictate how server and clients are to communicate - what is a command, how a response to be formatted, etc.
This could be a line-oriented protocol - each new line represents a message (in general the message delimiter could be any other character sequence not appearing in the messages).
Or it could be fixed length messages; or messages pre-pended with message length (or type) to let the other side know how much data yo expect.
I am trying to connect to Apple Push Notification Service which uses a simple binary protocol over TCP protected with TLS (or SSL). The protocol indicates that when an error is encountered (there are about 10 well defined error conditions) APNS will send back an error response and then close the connection. This results in a half closed socket because the remote peer closed the socket. I can see its a graceful shutdown because APNS sends a FIN and RST using tcpdump.
Out of all the error conditions, I can deal with most before sending with validation. The situation in which this fails is when a notification is sent to an invalid device token which cannot be dealt with that easily because the tokens could be malformed. Tokens are opaque 32 byte values that are provided by APNS to a device and then registered with me. I have no way of knowing if it is valid when submitted to my service. Presumably APNS checksums the tokens in some way that they can do quick validation on the token fast.
Anyway,
I did what I thought was the right thing:-
a. open socket
b. try writing
c. if write failed, read the error response
Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to work. I figure APNS is sending an error response and I am not reading it back right or I am not setting the socket up right. I have tried the following techniques:-
Use a separate thread per socket to try-read the response if any every 5ms or so.
Use a blocking read after write failure.
Use a final read after remote disconnect.
I have tried this with C# + .NET 4.5 on Windows and Java 1.7 on Linux. In either case, I never seem to get the error response and the socket indicates that no data is available to read.
Are half-closed sockets supported on these operating systems and/or frameworks? There isn't anything that seems to indicate either way.
I know that the way I am setting things up works correctly because if I use a valid token with a valid notification, those do get delivered.
In response to one of the comments, I am using the enhanced notification format so a response should arrive from APNS.
Here is the code I have for C#:-
X509Certificate certificate =
new X509Certificate(#"Foo.cer", "password");
X509CertificateCollection collection = new X509CertificateCollection();
collection.Add(certificate);
Socket socket =
new Socket(AddressFamily.InterNetwork, SocketType.Stream, ProtocolType.Tcp);
socket.Connect("gateway.sandbox.push.apple.com", 2195);
NetworkStream stream =
new NetworkStream(socket, System.IO.FileAccess.ReadWrite, false);
stream.ReadTimeout = 1000;
stream.WriteTimeout = 1000;
sslStream =
new SslStream(stream, true,
new RemoteCertificateValidationCallback(ValidateServerCertificate), null);
sslStream.AuthenticateAsClient("gateway.sandbox.push.apple.com", collection,
SslProtocols.Default, false);
sslStream.ReadTimeout = 10000;
sslStream.WriteTimeout = 1000;
// Task rdr = Task.Factory.StartNew(this.reader);
// rdr is used for parallel read of socket sleeping 5ms between each read.
// Not used now but another alternative that was tried.
Random r = new Random(DateTime.Now.Second);
byte[] buffer = new byte[32];
r.NextBytes(buffer);
byte[] resp = new byte[6];
String erroneousToken = toHex(buffer);
TimeSpan t = (DateTime.UtcNow - new DateTime(1970, 1, 1));
int timestamp = (int) t.TotalSeconds;
try
{
for (int i = 0; i < 1000; ++i)
{
// build the notification; format is published in APNS docs.
var not = new ApplicationNotificationBuilder().withToken(buffer).withPayload(
#'{"aps": {"alert":"foo","sound":"default","badge":1}}').withExpiration(
timestamp).withIdentifier(i+1).build();
sslStream.Write(buffer);
sslStream.Flush();
Console.Out.WriteLine("Sent message # " + i);
int rd = sslStream.Read(resp, 0, 6);
if (rd > 0)
{
Console.Out.WriteLine("Found response: " + rd);
break;
}
// doesn't really matter how fast or how slow we send
Thread.Sleep(500);
}
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
Console.Out.WriteLine("Failed to write ...");
int rd = sslStream.Read(resp, 0, 6);
if (rd > 0)
{
Console.Out.WriteLine("Found response: " + rd); ;
}
}
// rdr.Wait(); change to non-infinite timeout to allow error reader to terminate
I implemented server side for APNS in Java and have problems reading the error responses reliably (meaning - never miss any error response), but I do manage to get error responses.
You can see this related question, though it has no adequate answer.
If you never manage to read the error response, there must be something wrong with your code.
Using a separate thread for reading worked for me, though not 100% reliable.
Use a blocking read after write fail - that's what Apple suggest to do, but it doesn't always work. It's possible that you send 100 messages, and the first has an invalid token, and only after the 100th message you get a write failure. At this point it is sometimes too late to read the error response from the socket.
I'm not sure what you mean there.
If you want to guarantee that the reading of the error responses will work, you should try to read after each write, with a sufficient timeout. This, of course, is not practical for using in production (since it's incredibly slow), but you can use it to verify that your code of reading and parsing the error response is correct. You can also use it to iterate over all the device tokens you have, and find all the invalid ones, in order to clean your DB.
You didn't post any code, so I don't know what binary format you are using to send messages to APNS. If you are using the simple format (that starts with a 0 byte and has no message ID), you won't get any responses from Apple.
I'm trying to re-write one of our old Servers using ZeroMQ, for now I have the following Server setup, (which works for Zmq requests):
using (var context = ZmqContext.Create())
using (var server = context.CreateSocket(SocketType.REP)) {
server.Bind("tcp://x.x.x.x:5705");
while (true) { ... }
This kind of setup works fine if I use the Zmq client library to connect context.CreateSocket(SocketType.REQ)
But unfortunately we've got a lot of legacy code that needs to connect to this server and the sockets are created using .net socket libs:
Socket = new Socket(ipAddress.AddressFamily, SocketType.Stream, ProtocolType.Tcp);
Socket.Connect(ipAddress, port);
Is there a way to write a ZeroMQ Server to accept these traditional .net socket connections?
You can achieve this using ZMQ_STREAM sockets.
Please note that since zeroMQ 4.x, the RAW router option has been deprecated for a new ZMQ_STREAM socket type, that works the same way as ROUTER + RAW.
It seems it is bound to evolve, though.
I recently tried ZMQ_STREAM sockets in version 4.0.1.
You can open one, use zmq_rcv until you receive the whole message (you have to check it is whole yourself), or zmq_msg_rcv to let ZeroMQ handle it. You will receive an identifier message part, just like the identifier you would find in ROUTER sockets, directly followed by one ONLY body part. There is no empty delimiter between them like there would be using a REQ Socket talking to a ROUTER Socket. So if you route them, be sure to add it yourself.
Beware though: if there is latency on the other end or if your message exceeds ZeroMQ ZMQ_STREAM buffers (mine are 8192 bytes long), your message can be interpreted by zeroMQ as a series of messages.
In that case, you will receive as many different ZeroMQ messages including both the identifier part and the body part, and it is your job to aggregate them, knowing that if several clients are talking to the STREAM socket, they might get mixed up. I personnally use a hash table using the binary identifier as a key, and delete the entry from the table when I know the message is complete and sent to the next node.
Sending through a ZMQ_STREAM with zmq_msg_send or zmq_send works fine as is.
You probably have to use zmq's RAW socket type (instead of REP) to connect with and read client data without zmq-specific framing.
HTTP Server in C (from Pieter's blog)
http://hintjens.com/blog:42
RAW Socket type info
https://github.com/hintjens/libzmq/commit/777c38ae32a5d1799b3275d38ff8d587c885dd55
I prefer to use RPC Serialization but then send data using servlets.
We have strangely found that this performs better and it allows us to have general logic for retrying all servlet calls for example.
I have figured out how to send an object from server to client but can't find a way to serialize on client and deserialize on server.
SERVER TO CLIENT
Server:
serializedObj = RPC.encodeResponseForSuccess(DUMMY_METHOD_OF_TYPE_SERIZABLE, object);
Client:
GWT.create(MyRpc.class).createStreamReader(serializedObj).readObject();
CLIENT TO SERVER
Client:
SerializationStreamWriter streamWriter = streamFactory.createStreamWriter();
streamWriter.writeObject(object);
serializedObj = streamWriter.toString();
But how can I unserialize this after sending it by POST to the server?
Thanks!
http://softteco.blogspot.com/2010/02/serializing-objects-in-gwt-and.html
Note the server side deserialize option
// Getting parameter from request
String content = request.getParameter("content");
// Initializing stream reader
ServerSerializationStreamReader streamReader = new ServerSerializationStreamReader(
Thread.currentThread().getContextClassLoader(), null);
// Filling stream reader with data
streamReader.prepareToRead(content);
// Reading deserialized object from the stream
dto = (D) streamReader.readObject();