Help working with sockets, please

Question

hi
i've managed to do some applications similar to chat programs, and i would like to know if my design is... acceptable
my problem used to be that any function trying to read data from a socket would block until it gets some data. if my applicacion is like a chat, i don't know when data is arriving.
so my solution is:
create a thread, which would be always reading the input stream from the socket. whenever it gets data, it send an event which listened by the main class, say, a JFrame.
so i created my own events, listener and listenermulticaster. well it works great but i wonder if there is another simpler way to do it.
another think that bothers me:
when i have my thread with my connected socket, and i want to shut the appz down, the only way i've found is to close the socket. the thread must be able to manage that, and afterwards, returns from run function.
well what do u think about all of this?? i would be very grateful for any opinion you tell me
thanks in advance

Answer 1

a reference to the thread, calls that method. the
socket is closed, the main loop breaks (i dont
remember now if an exception is thrown) and the thread
ends
i agree, i dont like this and it seems unreliable.
about the method interrupt, what is the diference from
retunrning from run method??
thanks very much for your help!!you will have a method that is reading from the Socket, it will block until some data is available
closing the Socket (one would hope) should cause that method to throw an Exception, you can use that Exception to exit the run() method, but if the Socket is closed from the other end, then it seems unreliable that the Exception is thrown, leavin the read method waiting for data that it can never recive
Thread.interrupt() will terminate all such blocking IO methods and you can use this also to exit the run() method
belt and braces maybe, but handy all the same