A serversocket call accept(). Does it listen the port forever until get a reques

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Question: A serversocket call accept(). Does it listen the port forever until get a request? What's the meaning of non-blocking socket?

Answer: When accept() is called the thread is blocked until either a connection is made or socket's timeout is expired.

With non-blocking socket thread gets return straight away, and it is up to your application to decide what it is going to do - to stop or continue to check until a connection is established.

A server's ability to handle numerous client requests within a reasonable time is dependent on how effectively it uses I/O streams. So, a server must use I/O services concurrently. Until JDK 1.4, the Java platform have not heard about  nonblocking I/O. It was one thread to one client and Java servers were not scalable.

To fix the problem, Merlin's java.nio package is resolving thread overhead and the most important is the new SelectableChannel and Selector classes. By channel meant communication between a client and a server.

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