Java Examples in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

A Generic Multithreaded Server

Example 5-10 is a long and fairly complex example. The Server class it defines is a multithreaded server that provides services defined by implementations of a nested Server.Service interface. It can provide multiple services (defined by multiple Service objects) on multiple ports, and it has the ability to dynamically load and instantiate Service classes and add (and remove) new services at runtime. It logs its actions (to a stream, or, in Java 1.4, to a Logger) and limits the number of concurrent connections to a specified maximum.

The Server class uses a number of inner classes. The Server.Listener class is a thread that waits for connections on a given port. There is one Listener object for each service the Server is providing. The Server.ConnectionManager class manages the list of current connections to all services. There is one ConnectionManager shared by all services. When a Listener gets a connection from a client, it passes it to the ConnectionManager, which rejects it if the connection limit has been reached. If the ConnectionManager doesn’t reject a client, it creates a Server.Connection object to handle the connection. Connection is a Thread subclass, so each service can handle multiple connections at a time, making this a multithreaded server. Each Connection object is passed a Service object and invokes its serve( ) method, which is what actually provides the service.

The Service interface is a nested member of the Server ...