Continuous listening for UDP packets from Server

Question

I am trying to figure out how to implement a client that is constantly 'ready' or 'listening' for UDP packets from a server.

Do I essentially need to be constantly keeping socket.receive(packet) going until I receive one and then once I do, open it again?

Should I set a significant socket.setSoTimeout() time so that it loops minimal times?

What I need to do:

Be able to request particular packets from the server and then, in an indefinite amount of time later receive any number of packets

Answer 1

Depending on how high-volume your traffic is, you might look at NIO, though it's a significantly more complicated option to understand and employ.

If you have just a basic application, then start a thread that just blocks on receive(packet). Whenever it returns (a packet has arrived), dispatch the packet to some sort of handler. If there's low traffic, this might be a BlockingQueue that some other thread is listening to; if you have high traffic, you might send a job to an ExecutorService to be handled in parallel.