Java socket communication using NIO

Question

Currently, our application uses socket input and output streams for communication. In the concrete example, it reads from a console input stream and writes to a socket output stream. If the socket input is closed from the outside, but the writing is blocking, the output stream can not be closed causing to hang.

Hence I thought to use some polling in a loop where the (console) input stream is polled regularly to detect whether it is closed and hence close the output stream.

According to this article it looks like I have to take SocketChannel s instead of inputstream and outputstream. Are inputstream and outputstream decoupled so I can first try it with SocketChannel for the inputstream and leave the outputstream code as is?

Answer 1

SocketChannel has pretty different usage model instead of Sockets. But you may of course open SocketChannel and send data using write(...) methods.

SocketChannel allows non-blocking network calls (so it is very scalable), and it is more cheap in opening connections (less CPU overhead).