wow... that's a rather confusing question. you might need to clarify some basic things about what your little app is doing in a "big picture" sort of way... example "I have a server program that allows multiple clients to connect to it. The client allows a user to type a message in a text field, press a button, and sends the message to the server. The server's job is to send this message to the other clients," ... and then it'd be clearer to understand what your problem might be with actionPerformed.

First... how does the server have a button in it (as you stated)? That notwithstanding, "actionPerformed" should be implemented in the "ActionListener" object that has the job of "passing along" the fact that the event took place. The presence of distributing an application over sockets doesn't really change the usage pattern of the Button->event->actionPerformed concept. That's not a great answer, but it wasn't a great question. ;) In the case of my example above, actionPerformed is implemented in the client-side GUI; the code for that method might just hand off the message to some other [private] method that pumps it across the socket connection to the server. What happens at that point would depend on the/your design of the/your client/server interaction protocol.