Thread: Looking for a way to emulate network application

Hi there,

I am currently testing the networking part of an application. Its a typical Client-Server architecture.
I want to test whether all the data is correctly synchronized on all clients at any point in time. For this purpose I want to leave the system running with multiple clients.
The problem is, this is very hard for me to test. I can not create multiple clients on a single machine because every port can only be used once.
So I have to test with multiple machines, but I dont always have access to all of them and administrating the test across multiple machines is also tedious.

So I would like to know whether there is some kind of library out there which can be used to emulate the java ServerSocket and Socket classes in a way that it is indenticle to actual network traffic but running on only a single machine.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

A number of simple virtual machines?

Yes, just regular JVM's running a Client-Server application.
I would just need some kind of library that would emulate TCP Sockets / ServerSockets on a single machine. Possibly with files.
Performance is not important, just correctness. It needs to be an exact duplicate of regular Socket communication.