Is there a good Java networking library? [closed]

Question

I'm currently searching for a Java networking library. What I want to do is sending XML, JSON or other serialized messages from a client to another client and/or client to server.

My first attempt was to create an POJO for each message, plus a MessageWriter for sending and a MessageReader for receiving it. Plus socket and error handling. Which is quite a lot of error prone work.

What I'm looking for is a a higher level library which abstracts from sockets. Furthermore it should supports something like code generation for the messages.

Google's Protocol Buffers (http://code.google.com/apis/protocolbuffers/) looks promising. But are there alternatives? The emphasis is not on speed or security (at the moment), it is just supposed to work reliable and with a low amount of implementation time.

Answer 1

You have several options depending on how abstracted from raw sockets you want to get. Once you depart from socket level programming, you're pretty much into remoting territory,

• Standard Remoting Options for Java: RMI or JMS
• Implement JMX Mbeans in each client and the servers and use JMX remoting to invoke message passing operations.
• If you think you might want to use multicast, I would definitely check JGroups.
• If you're looking to create your own protocol but want to use some existing building blocks, check out Jakarta Commons Net. The HttpClient referenced in Answer #1 has been incorporated into this package.
• There are also some interesting proprietary messaging systems that have the added virtue of supporting multiple platforms/languages such as Spread and DBus.
• Can't enumerate remoting options without mentioning WebServices.... but.... blech!

I am not completely sure what you mean by code generation for the messages. Can you elaborate ?