Hi,
I have a scenario in which I have to connection to a third party using socket on a specific port. My question is how do we manage connection management for sockets. I mean features like Connection Pooling, Re-connecition on disconnection etc.
Because creating a connection each tmie whenever we need to contact 3rd party would be kind of overhead.
So is there any framework or design pattern for the same.
Generally you try to do connection pooling at the client side, such that when you're finished with a connection you return it to a pool, and when you need a connection you first look in the pool for an existing connection to the same target. At the server, instead of writing your client handler like this:
read request
write response
close
you write it like this:
while ((read request doesn't produce an EOF)
write response
close
In this scenario the client always has to be prepared to deal with getting a possibly dead connection from the pool, in which case it has to open a new Socket and retry. Possibly the client will have a thread scanning the pool for entries that are getting too old. At the server there should always be a shortish read timeout, and if the timeout happens it should close the socket and exit the thread.
The above describes Java RMI's connection pooling pretty accurately.