Question:
I am writing a server written in Java that needs to take input from a game written in Visual Basic and sends the output to clients on the Internet. I’m having a really hard time getting data from a socket connection initiated from the VB code (standard Winsock OCX). What type of InputStream would handle this type of cross-platform socket communication best?
Answer:
The type of InputSream you use will depend heavily on the data representation used in your program’s communication protocol. More thanlikely, you will have to use the InputStreamyou obtained from your Socket and perhaps wrapit with a BufferedInputStream. Then you willhave to read the bytes and do whatever conversion might be necessary to Java primitives. Thisis why many Internet protocols use ASCII textmessages as the underlying representation fortheir communications.
