TCP socket communication

Question

I am creating a Chat in java. I have a method (onMouseRelease) inside an object that creates a tcp server and waits for a socket like this:

 ServerSocket server = new ServerSocket(port);
 Socket channel = server.accept();

Now I want to make a thread that will loop and read data from the socket, so that once the user on the other side sends me a string, I will extract the data from the socket ( or is it called packet? Sorry, I am new to this ) and update a textbox to add the additional string from the socket ( or packet? ).

I have no idea how to READ ( extract ) the information from the socket( /packet ) and then update it into a JTextArea which is called userOutput. And how to send a string to the other client, so that it will also could read the new data and update its JTextArea. From what I know, for a 2 sided TCP communication you need one computer to host a server and the other to connect ( as a client ) and once the connection is set the client can also receive new information from the socket. Is that true? and please tell me how.

Any help is appreciated! I know this is a bit long but I have searched a lot and didn't understand it ( I saw something like PrintWriter but failed to understand ).

Answer 1

You would have to do something like this;

 InputStream in = new BufferedInputStream(channel.getInputStream());

You can then read characters from the socket using a loop;

char ch;

 while (!finished) {

    ch = in.read(); //read from socket
    if(ch = -1) {
       //nothing left to read
       finished = true;
    }
    else {
       //do something with ch
    }
 }

I can continue if you'd like?

Say we saved the incoming chars to a String called input , to update your text area you would call;

textArea.setText(input);

And to send text back to the client you would use a similar method to receiving, using an outputstream;

OutputStream out = new BufferedOutputStream(clientSock.getOutputStream());
out.write(output);