Author: James CE Johnson

ACE Tutorial 015
Building a protocol stream

The Client object is designed to hide all of the messy connection logic from it's users. It also provides put/get methods for sending data to the server and receiving the server's response. Note the Protocol_Stream member that will take care of converting and sending/receiving the data.

    // page03.html,v 1.13 1999/04/03 21:56:29 jcej Exp

    #ifndef CLIENT_H
    #define CLIENT_H

    #include "ace/SOCK_Stream.h"

    #if !defined (ACE_LACKS_PRAGMA_ONCE)
    # pragma once
    #endif /* ACE_LACKS_PRAGMA_ONCE */

    #include "Protocol_Stream.h"

    class ACE_Message_Block;

    /* Hide the details of connection and protocol-conformance from the
       application-level logic.
    */
    class Client
    {
    public:
      // Provide the server information when constructing the
      // object.  This could (and probably should) be moved to the
      // open() method.
      Client (u_short port,
              const char *server);

      // Cleanup...
      ~Client (void);

      // Open the connection to the server.
      int open (void);

      // Close the connection to the server.  Be sure to do this
      // before you let the Client go out of scope.
      int close (void);

      // Put a message to the server.  The Client assumes ownership of
      // <message> at that point and will release() it when done.  Do not
      // use <message> after passing it to put().
      int put (ACE_Message_Block *message);

      // Get a response from the server.  The caller becomes the owner of
      // <response> after this call and is responsible for invoking
      // release() when done.
      int get (ACE_Message_Block *&response);

    private:
      // Protocol_Stream hides the protocol conformance details from us.
      Protocol_Stream stream_;

      // We create a connection on the peer_ and then pass ownership of it
      // to the protocol stream.
      ACE_SOCK_Stream peer_;

      // Endpoing information saved by the constructor for use by open().
      u_short port_;
      const char *server_;

      // Accessors for the complex member variables.

      Protocol_Stream &stream (void)
      {
        return this->stream_;
      }

      ACE_SOCK_Stream &peer (void)
      {
        return this->peer_;
      }
    };

    #endif /* CLIENT_H */

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