Pushing data to Flash using binary sockets

// December 17th, 2008 // Experiments, Source code & tutorials

My personal challenge for today was to create a Java socket server that pushes data to flash using binary sockets. That sounds harder than it is, to my surprise it was actually quite simple.

I never made something with Java before, but its very similar to ActionScript 3 (or the other way around ) and if you already use Eclipse for your ActionScript development, you will find it not hard to start with.

The ActionScript socket part is even easier:
Make a socket object, connect to your host an server port, and start listening to the incoming bytes

var s:Socket = new Socket("localhost",9999)
s.addEventListener(ProgressEvent.SOCKET_DATA, getData)
 
private function getData(event : ProgressEvent) : void
{
	var output:String =s.readUTFBytes(s.bytesAvailable)
	trace(output)
}

To send data to the server you just write the bytes an flush.

s.writeUTFBytes("Hello server")
s.flush()

et Voila:
binary socket connection

Download the Java and Flash source: flash_java_socket_src
(This is my first java “app”, don’t expect it to be great and free of bugs )

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4 Responses to “Pushing data to Flash using binary sockets”

dservgun says:

December 22, 2008 at 9:45 pm

Hi, I ran into a tricky problem. I can see a message being sent from the server (in case you are interested, its a mina-based server). The client seems to be missing the message. Should a client be calling socket.readUTFBytes(socket.bytesAvailable) in a loop?
Thanks,
Kris says:

December 23, 2008 at 3:07 pm

No, no loop, just the ProgressEvent.
Try adding these events for debugging: Event.CONNECT,IOErrorEvent.IO_ERROR, SecurityErrorEvent.SECURITY_ERROR

Also, now I’m implementing it in a real world example I noticed you have to sheck a policy file from a socket server on the same domain

Security.loadPolicyFile(“xmlsocket://localhost:9998)

Google for “Socket policy server” for an example.
Ravi says:

January 27, 2009 at 9:19 pm

Can you pls suggest me the C++ Code instead of Java server, I
kris says:

January 27, 2009 at 10:56 pm

I don’t know much about C++, but maybe this will help? http://www.alhem.net/Sockets/tutorial/