Binding of a server socket to an address that is not a localhostaddress

Dear Experts,

I have been using Sockets to establish communication between the 2 classes.
I have a class x1 which is reqd to communicate with either one of the several receiving classes a1,a2,a3...

Currently, i'm biniding the server sockets of the receiving classes, to different ports, and am passing the port mumber as a parameter to the x1 class..

So the socket in x1, and that particular server socket bound to the respective port will be in communication.

=> Is it possible for me to use ip addresses instead of ports?

=> I tried to bind a server socket to an address which wasn't the localhost address. I'm getting an exception,
" java.net.BindException: Cannot assign requested address: JVM_Bind "
Is it not possible to do so?

Hi,

as far as I can remember you can bind to the localhost, and that is mapped to a physical ip address by the operating system, which in turn is generally bound to a network card/adapter.

So if you had two network adapters then you could bind two ip addresses.

This is unusual however, its more usual to have a single ip address and use different port numbers

thank you sir JRobinson...