Keeping persistent connections from a home-made Java server

Question

I've built a simple Java program that works as a server locally.

At the moment it does a few things, such as previews directories, forwards to index.html if directory contains it, sends Last-Modified header and responds properly to a client's If-Modifed-Since request.

What I need to do now is make my program accept persistent connections. It's threaded at the moment so that each connection has it's own thread. I want to put my entire thread code within a loop that continues until either Connection: close, or a specified timeout.

Does anybody have any ideas where to start?

Edit: This is a university project, and has to be done without the use of Frameworks.

I have a main method, which loops indefinitely, each time it loops it creates a Socket object, a HTTPThread object is then created (A class of my own creation) - that processes the single request.

I want to allow multiple requests to work within a single connection making use of the Connection: keep-alive request header. I expect to use a loop in my HTTPThread class, I'm just not sure how to pass multiple requests.

Thanks in advance :)

Answer 1

I assume that you are implementing the HTTP protocol code yourself starting with the Socket APIs. And that you are implementing the persistent connections part of the HTTP spec.

You can put the code in the loop as you propose, and use Socket.setSoTimeout to set the timeout on blocking operations, and hence your HTTP timeouts. You don't need to do anything to reuse the streams for your connection ... apart from not closing them.

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I would point out that there are much easier ways to implement a web server. There are many existing Java web server frameworks and application servers, or you could repurpose the Apache HTTP protocol stacks.