Recommended: Sing it, brah! 5 fabulous songs for developers
JW's Top 5
Optimize with a SATA RAID Storage Solution
Range of capacities as low as $1250 per TB. Ideal if you currently rely on servers/disks/JBODs
Page 3 of 5
Newcomers to NIO sometimes associate it with "non-blocking input/output." NIO is more than non-blocking I/O but the error makes sense: basic I/O in Java is blocking -- meaning that it waits until it can complete an operation -- whereas non-blocking, or asynchronous, I/O is one of the most-used NIO facilities.
NIO's non-blocking I/O is event-based, as demonstrated by the file-system listener in Listing 1. This means that a selector (or callback or listener) is defined for an I/O channel, then processing continues. When an event occurs on the selector -- when a line of input arrives, for instance -- the selector "wakes up" and executes. All of this is achieved within a single thread, which is a significant contrast to typical Java I/O.
Listing 2 demonstrates the use of NIO selectors in a multi-port networking echo-er, a program slightly modified from one created by Greg Travis in 2003 (see Resources). Unix and Unix-like operating systems have long had efficient implementations of selectors, so this sort of networking program is a model of good performance for a Java-coded networking program.
import java.io.*;
import java.net.*;
import java.nio.*;
import java.nio.channels.*;
import java.util.*;
public class MultiPortEcho
{
private int ports[];
private ByteBuffer echoBuffer = ByteBuffer.allocate( 1024 );
public MultiPortEcho( int ports[] ) throws IOException {
this.ports = ports;
configure_selector();
}
private void configure_selector() throws IOException {
// Create a new selector
Selector selector = Selector.open();
// Open a listener on each port, and register each one
// with the selector
for (int i=0; i<ports.length; ++i) {
ServerSocketChannel ssc = ServerSocketChannel.open();
ssc.configureBlocking(false);
ServerSocket ss = ssc.socket();
InetSocketAddress address = new InetSocketAddress(ports[i]);
ss.bind(address);
SelectionKey key = ssc.register(selector, SelectionKey.OP_ACCEPT);
System.out.println("Going to listen on " + ports[i]);
}
while (true) {
int num = selector.select();
Set selectedKeys = selector.selectedKeys();
Iterator it = selectedKeys.iterator();
while (it.hasNext()) {
SelectionKey key = (SelectionKey) it.next();
if ((key.readyOps() & SelectionKey.OP_ACCEPT)
== SelectionKey.OP_ACCEPT) {
// Accept the new connection
ServerSocketChannel ssc = (ServerSocketChannel)key.channel();
SocketChannel sc = ssc.accept();
sc.configureBlocking(false);
// Add the new connection to the selector
SelectionKey newKey = sc.register(selector, SelectionKey.OP_READ);
it.remove();
System.out.println( "Got connection from "+sc );
} else if ((key.readyOps() & SelectionKey.OP_READ)
== SelectionKey.OP_READ) {
// Read the data
SocketChannel sc = (SocketChannel)key.channel();
// Echo data
int bytesEchoed = 0;
while (true) {
echoBuffer.clear();
int number_of_bytes = sc.read(echoBuffer);
if (number_of_bytes <= 0) {
break;
}
echoBuffer.flip();
sc.write(echoBuffer);
bytesEchoed += number_of_bytes;
}
System.out.println("Echoed " + bytesEchoed + " from " + sc);
it.remove();
}
}
}
}
static public void main( String args[] ) throws Exception {
if (args.length<=0) {
System.err.println("Usage: java MultiPortEcho port [port port ...]");
System.exit(1);
}
int ports[] = new int[args.length];
for (int i=0; i<args.length; ++i) {
ports[i] = Integer.parseInt(args[i]);
}
new MultiPortEcho(ports);
}
}
Compile this source, then launch it from the command-line with an invocation such as java MultiPortEcho 8005 8006. Once the MultiPortEchoer is running, start up a simple telnet or other terminal emulator running against ports 8005 and 8006. You will see that the
program echoes back characters it receives -- and does it in a single Java thread!
java.nio package and offers tips for leveraging its nonblocking I/O and memory-mapped buffers.