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Errors-To: <gerim@legalvista.com>
Message-ID: <38D22BCA.A1FE8AD4@legalvista.com>
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2000 12:57:47 +0000
From: Gerard Monsen <gerim@legalvista.com>
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To: tomcat-user@jakarta.apache.org
Subject: HTTP Tunneling using Tomcat
References: <001601bf9046$e00fb720$73010101@webpc>
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      Does anyone here know of any way to create a constant
socket connection through HTTP?  I had thought there might
be a way through servlets.  It seemed all I had to do was get
the ServletInputStream and ServletOutputStream and never
close them.  I could then theoretically write to and read from
the streams for as long as I wanted.
      Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to work and all of the
documentation and books on servlets I've seen only concentrate
on the request/response model for servlets.  I'm getting
the idea that what I'm looking for may not be possible because
of the way HTTP was designed, but I'm wondering if perhaps
someone here had found a way to get around that.
      We want to do this for three reasons:

1.  We want the constant socket connection for speed purposes,
and so that as new information comes to the server, it gets sent
to the client right away.

2.  We want the connection to run through our secure https server
so that all communications are encrypted with SSL.  As an added
bonus, this means that all of the encryption will be done with faster
native code (the SSL server on the server, the browser code on
the client).  We can't use Sun's encryption mechanisms, because
they cause SecurityException's in untrusted applets.

3.  Most importantly, it gets around any potential problems with
firewalls.

       Any help you can give would be most appreciated.

Gerard Monsen
Integrated Litigation Solutions
Oakland, CA