They're still a notch below remote procedure calls (because with RPCs the send and receive are implicit.)

The parsing of arguments into a serializable form, and the unparsing/deserialization into an actual object, are also automatic with RPC mechanisms.

But, as we said, sockets have come a long way in what they can send and receive.

So they can still save you a few headaches.

OK---after this brief discussion let's get back to coding.

Let's add to the user interface on the client side.

We start by defining an inner class, a panel, that creates the graphics background in the client frame.