Amazon.com Review
Andy Wilson's
Network Programming with Microsoft Visual J++ 6 provides networking essentials for Visual J++ 6 programmers. With efficient examples and crisp commentary, this title provides essential material on taking advantage of the built-in networking support of Java and Visual J++.
The book begins with a tour of Internet Protocol (IP), including the structure of packets and common protocols such as TCP and User Datagram Protocol (UDP). An initial example, a chat server running with UDP (a connectionless protocol), showcases basic Java classes for network programming. The more sophisticated TCP protocol comes next, with a file transfer application written with multithreading and Java socket classes.
Several sections on broadcasting follow, with some background material on the Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) first and some of the details of broadcasting packets on today's routers. The sample application, which retrieves all the hosts on your network, tries out the ideas here. A section on multicasting improves the chat application presented earlier with a version that can handle multiple chat clients.
Subsequent chapters cover serializing Java objects in packets and developing client/server applications in Java. Here, the author considers issues such as security, performance, and scalability. Sample client/server applications, for a Simple Transfer Mail Protocol (SMTP) mail server and a proxy server, provide invaluable examples for writing your own Java applications. Final chapters consider writing applications that make use of "native" socket functionality via J/Direct and Raw Native Interface (RNI) calls, with sample code for each for monitoring Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) packets on the network.
Java is undoubtedly a network-ready language, and Network Programming with Microsoft Visual J++ 6 can have you writing network applications in record time. --Richard Dragan
