Socket Exceptions

Most methods of the Socket class are declared to throw IOException or its subclass, java.net.SocketException:

public class SocketException extends IOException

However, knowing that a problem occurred is often not sufficient to deal with the problem. Did the remote host refuse the connection because it was busy? Did the remote host refuse the connection because no service was listening on the port? Did the connection attempt timeout because of network congestion or because the host was down? There are several subclasses of SocketException that provide more information about what went wrong and why:

public class BindException extends SocketException public class ConnectException extends SocketException public class NoRouteToHostException extends SocketException

A BindException is thrown if you try to construct a Socket or ServerSocket object on a local port that is in use or that you do not have sufficient privileges to use. A ConnectException is thrown when a connection is refused at the remote host, which usually happens because the host is busy or no process is listening on that port. Finally, a NoRouteToHostException indicates that the connection has timed out. The java.net package also includes ProtocolException, a direct subclass of IOException:

public class ProtocolException extends IOException

This is thrown when data is received from the network that somehow violates the TCP/IP specification. None of these exception classes have any special methods you wouldn't find in any other exception class, but you can take advantage of these subclasses to provide more informative error messages or to decide whether retrying the offending operation is likely to be successful.