How to listen a socket in Tomcat(servlet container)?

Question

I have to let an web application to listen a socket(ServerSocket), and handle the socket stream.

But the application is just deployed in Tomcat which is just a servlet container, it doesn't have JCA support. And establishing a server socket in servlet thread is unreasonable.

solution 1:

The ugly solution is to write a standalone java application to listen socket, then communicate with web server. but it is not a sound solution.

solution 2:

I wrote a ServletContextListener which starts to listen socket when contextInitialized(), once receiving a socket, it will be handed by a thread. That means a thread pool is located in ServletContext. Of course, I destroy the thread pool when contextDestroyed.

What do you think about the solutions?

Answer 1

The "standalone Java application" can be as good executed from inside a ServletContextListener. You can manage a threadpool using ExecutorService.