DDevelopment & Design

NetCat in Java

Recently, I tried to run netcat under Windows and I failed to compile it. So I decided to write a simple equivalent in Java, which works under all platforms.

NetCat is a very simple and useful tool, which allows to see contents of TCP/IP requests, like HTTP etc., both server and client side. With NetCat it is possible to either set up TCP/IP listener on a port and receive data or send TCP/IP request to remote server.

The code and executable for Java version of NetCat is available on GitHub:
http://github.com/rafalrusin/netcat/downloads

I used Jakarta Commons CLI to handle commandline parameters. The code is as simple as that:

In order to handle stream I/O I implemented a simple StreamTransferer class like this:

The only issue I had was that whenever I closed Java I/O stream using OutputStream.close(), it was closing the whole socket. So I couldn’t receive any response back from server. So instead of doing that I had to use Socket shutdownOutput method, like in the code below.

It worked perfectly then.

So it is possible to send HTTP GET requests to google using this tool. In order to do that, you need to connect to google.com and type GET and enter. CTRL+Z and enter is for closing input stream under Windows. CTRL+D is for Linux.

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DDevelopment & Design

Grails render as JSON catch

One of a reasons your controller doesn't render a proper response in JSON format might be wrong package name that you use. It is easy to overlook. Import are on top of a file, you look at your code and everything seems to be fine. Except response is still not in JSON format.

Consider this simple controller:

class RestJsonCatchController {
def grailsJson() {
render([first: 'foo', second: 5] as grails.converters.JSON)
    }

def netSfJson() {
render([first: 'foo', second: 5] as net.sf.json.JSON)
    }
}

And now, with finger crossed... We have a winner!

$ curl localhost:8080/example/restJsonCatch/grailsJson
{"first":"foo","second":5}
$ curl localhost:8080/example/restJsonCatch/netSfJson
{first=foo, second=5}

As you can see only grails.converters.JSON converts your response to JSON format. There is no such converter for net.sf.json.JSON, so Grails has no converter to apply and it renders Map normally.

Conclusion: always carefully look at your imports if you're working with JSON in Grails!

Edit: Burt suggested that this is a bug. I've submitted JIRA issue here: GRAILS-9622 render as class that is not a codec should throw exception