Socket and threads

[Anonymous]

Hi!
I have a problem. I have a program using socket server communication and it works fine as long as I only have one user at time.
The flow of the program is
Receiver waiting for messenger
Sender send message, and start to wait for a response message
Receiver get message, and send a response message, start waiting for a now message.
And so on�
To day I can only send one question at time (can only have one user) but I want to have many�
Is it possible to solve with threads? And in that case, does anybody have an example of hove to solve it.
Thanks!

[Ernest Friedman-Hill]

Yes, you can solve this using threads. Basically, what you do looks something like this:

while (true) {
  Socket s = serverSocket.accept();
  new Thread(new ClientServicer(s)).start();
}
...
class ClientServicer implements Runnable {
  private Socket s;
  ClientServicer(Socket s) {
    this.s = s;
  }
  public void run() {
    // Here you put all the client-servicing code from your existing
    // application; the open socket is in the member variable.
  }
}

Of course, there are complications. But that's the basic idea.

[Stan James]

Your example is pretty much exactly what I'm doing right now. Creating and discarding a thread per request is easy, but not the most efficient. What's the next step up the ladder of complexity, scalability and robustness? Thread pooling?