Some background: I'm writing a Swing application that connects to a
central database. I coach a quiz bowl team and want the ability for
students to enter questions and quiz themselves while only having one
copy of questions.
Because the app needs to talk to the server (to say, "add a new
question to the database" or "give me a list of all the subjects")
and the server needs to talk to the app (to say, "someone changed the
list of subjects" or "please log in"), I had originally set up
InputStreams and OutputStreams at both ends of the connection. I was
passing information back and forth by using ObjectInputStream and
ObjectOutputStream so that I could throw the information in a
Serializable class and send an object to represent the information
across the Socket.
Is it possible to leave the Socket open and continue to pass
information back and forth this way? I ask because I keep getting
StreamCorruptedExceptions with no extra information about why. If I
can't keep the Streams open and instead must close them after each
interchange, how do I keep track of the state of each client app? (I
was doing it in the Thread that got spawned to handle each incoming
request.)
The most frustrating part of this is that I got it to the point where
the app would get a lot of information from the server, set up the
UI, and run, but started running into trouble when a second query for
the list of subjects after adding a new one and have been unable to
get any farther. (I tried resetting the ObjectOutputStreams after
each write, but still everything dies at the same point.)
Any help appreciated, including advice about how I should really be
doing this. I've thought about RMI, but I really need both the app
and the server to be able to initiate contact, and from my quick
perusal of RMI, it seems like all the remote objects have to live on
one machine. I've also looked at the NIO package, but can't figure
out what it really gains me except the need to translate all my data
objects into byte arrays so I can ship them back and forth. I don't
really need non-blocking I/O (I don't think) because there isn't
really much that either side of the connection can do while it's
waiting for data from the other and I should never have more than 30
people connected to the server at any one time.
Thanks for any help,
Todd
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