How to create HTTP Server in Java - ServerSocket Example

Java has a very good networking support, allows you to write client server application by using TCP Sockets. In this tutorial, we will learn how to create a simple HTTP Server in Java, which can listen HTTP request on a port let's say 80 and can send response to client. Being an HTTP Server, you can connect to it using your browser e.g. Chrome, Firefox or Internet Explorer. Though HTTP is ubiquitous and present everywhere, Java doesn't have a dedicated API to create and parse HTTP request, there is no in built HTTP client library in JDK. Though there is no short of good open source library e.g. you can use Jsoup to parse HTML and can use Apache HttpClient library for sending GET and POST request right from your Java program. By the way, for those who wants to master network programming in Java, I suggest to read Java Network Programming, 4th Addition by Harold, Elliotte Rusty, its very comprehensive and not only covers both TCP/IP and UDP protocols, which are backbone of internet but also dive deep into the HTTP protocol, including REST, HTTP headers, and cookies. Book is very focused on practical and you will find lot of interesting example related to common networking task e.g. writing multi-threaded servers, using non blocking IO and using low level socket classes.

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