When Java detects activity in the menu bar or channel field, it will call the event handler routine. From here, it determines where the event came from and performs the appropriate processing. The big vs. little endian debate has been the topic of many flame wars on the Internet. Big and little endian refers to the order of bytes. Imagine an array of 4 bytes.
Some hardware does it one way, and some does it the other.
If you are writing a client and server in C to run on the same type of hardware, the endian problem doesn't pop up. But if you are using a different language, like Java, to talk to a server written in C, there could be a big problem. Endian problems crop up only when multiple byte data types like integers are sent across the network. Java automatically converts its data to and from network byte order when it sends data through a socket. C, on the other hand, does only as it is told.