Using Java and the socket interface in teaching client/server programming

Abstract

In this poster, we present our experience developing JAVA applets and applications to create a client/server system on the world wide web, and show how the product is used in upper-division computer science classes.The set of programs consist of a client and a server. The client program in the prototype is a JAVA applet that is downloaded into the client machine and is executed in a user's web browser using the local memory, CPU and other resources. The server program in the prototype is a JAVA application that runs on a web server all the time. The client and the server programs use the socket interface [ Comer&Stevens 96] as the communication protocol, and are able to transmit data back and forth successfully over the internet. Figure 1 illustrates how the client and the server communicate over the socket interface.With the set of programs in place, students in the upper-division computer science classes, including software engineering, databases systems, and distributed application development, are able to build their own software for the course projects, on top of the software prototypes.Revision of a given set of JAVA programs proves to be a better approach in learning client/server programming using JAVA and sockets, compared to requiring students to create JAVA programs from the scratch.