Multi-Tasking Sockets

This article is about a client/server multi-threaded socket class. The thread is optional since the developer is still responsible to decide if needs it. There are other Socket classes here and other places over the Internet but none of them can provide feedback (event detection) to your application like this one does. It provides you with the following events detection: connection established, connection dropped, connection failed and data reception (including 0 byte packet).

This article presents a new socket class which supports both TCP and UDP communication. But it provides some advantages compared to other classes that you may find here or on some other Socket Programming articles. First of all, this class doesn't have any limitation like the need to provide a window handle to be used. This limitation is bad if all you want is a simple console application. So this library doesn't have such a limitation. It also provides threading support automatically for you, which handles the socket connection and disconnection to a peer. It also features some options not yet found in any socket classes that I have seen so far. It supports both client and server sockets.

A server socket can be referred as to a socket that can accept many connections. And a client socket is a socket that is connected to server socket. You may still use this class to communicate between two applications without establishing a connection. In the latter case, you will want to create two UDP server sockets (one for each application). This class also helps reduce coding need to create chat-like applications and IPC (Inter-Process Communication) between two or more applications (processes). Reliable communication between two peers is also supported with TCP/IP with error handling. You may want to use the smart addressing operation to control the destination of the data being transmitted (UDP only). TCP operation of this class deals only with communication between two peers

HARDWARE REQUIREMENTS