Is this possible: HTTP tunnelling/Network streams

I'm asking this because I don't mind spending hours or days on it if it is
possible, but I'd like to know if it's something workable before I spend a
long time digging into it.

I have people I'm working with who are behind firewalls. With some people,
we've used different versions of VNC. Even though they're running the
server so I can help them on their computers, their connection is outbound,
so most firewalls don't block it.

However, in some cases, I'm working with people with a restrictive firewall.
It won't let VNC out, even if they run it on port 80.

I have yet to do any networking programming on Java (or at all, really), but
I've noticed how Java uses IO streams, and you can just wrap one around the
other and wrap another around that, and so on, until you have all the
layers you need.

So would that be possible to do with networking? Can I wrap streams in
other streams?

I was thinking I could have them use VNC on their system and connect to the
localhost. Then write a Java program that listens on the VNC port, takes
the data coming in, wraps it in an HTTP stream and sends it out, on port
80, to my address on the Internet. I receive it on port 80 on my computer
and use the reciprocal version of the program to take the HTTP on port 80,
unwrap the HTTP stream, and output the VNC stream. Then my VNC, addressing
MY localhost, outputs the data. My Java app on my end receives it, wraps
it in an HTTP stream, sends it back out to the source, it is seen by the
other person's firewall as HTTP traffic on port 80, and gets through to my
friend's computer, where the Java app again outputs the actual VNC stream
on the local host, where his VNC app picks it up.

Is this possible in Java? And is it possible to do in less than several
months of dealing with esoteric details?

Thanks!

Hal
.

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