In java, how will a client know that the server has quit?

Question

So I'm in the making of a very simple server/client complex using java. So far I have managed to figure out what happens if the client quits, because then the server receives null while listening from any input from the client.

BUT - what happens if the client is connected and the server quits for any reason... the server is supposed to wait for input from the client, but how can the client know that the server is not listening anymore? For me the clients call to the server just goes into the void... nothing happens...

Can I do something to find out when the server goes down? Time-out, ping/pong or something?

As You surely can see I'm quite new at this, I'm just curious. This was a puzzle for me ever since I attended computer science at the university.

Thanks in advance. dr_xemacs.

Answer 1

Your Server probably may be running on a certain port and so you can add a health check at the client side and update a global flag with status to let client know about its availibity :-

Socket socket = null;
try
{
    socket = new Socket(host, port);
    return true;
}
catch (Exception e)
{
    return false;
}
finally
{
    if(socket != null)
        try 
        {
             socket.close();
        }
        catch(Exception e){}
}