ifightcrime / chatosaur Goto Github PK

distributed system chat client

Java 100.00%

chatosaur's Introduction

I'm creating issues on here for things that need to be done. I'll be gone until thursday, but will have the entire evening to work on things and finish the project.

If you guys can work on it at some point and get one or two of the issues taken care of that would be awesome.

--Getting a single server/client running

1. clone the repo, duhhh
2. navigate one directory outside the repo (so if you have your repo in ~/chatosaur, you want to be in ~/)
3. run java chatosaur.server.Server to get the server started
4. do option one to get the server running on a port

5. navigate to that directory in another window and run java chatosaur.client.Client
6. use host=localhost and port=[the port you specified above]
7. you should now be chatting!

8. the server creates a log file "server_[port].log" you can tail to see what's going on

--Adding another server:

1. open a new window and run chatosaur.server.Server like before
2. hit option 1 and start the server on a different port
3. once the server is running hit option 2 on the OTHER server and enter in 'localhost' and the port of the new server to add it
4. if all goes well you should see the updated list propagate in the log to the new server.

--Compiling

I have just been using a text editor to work on this thing, but feel free to create a new branch and make a netbeans/eclipse project or w/e.

To compile the server run:

javac chatosaur/server/*.java

To compile the client run:

javac chatosaur/client/*.java

(remember to be one directory up from the repo again)

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tascony

chatosaur's Issues

Server should update other server's lists on graceful shutdown

When in the options menu on a server and you exit/shutdown the server, the server should be removed from the list and updated amongst other servers.

propagateList() in Server should be the method to use, just gotta remove the current server first.

Get client receiving server list upon connect

Now that the server lists are being sent between connected servers, the clients need to be able to get a current copy of the list when they connect to any given server.

Give user option to connect to a server in list on first connect

when the client connects to any server, it should first be prompted with a list of servers ("rooms") it can connect to before actually being throw in to the chat room mix.

This should be fairly reliable because the servers should have a pretty up to date server list.

Remove server from list if unresponsive (down)

this is a way to keep the server list up to par if a server disconnects without being shutdown gracefully.

We should have some way for a server to go through the list ever x minutes and ping each server in the list. If a server has disconnected, remove it from the list.

testConnection in Server should work for pinging, we just might have to set up a new thread class to continuously keep pinging the servers every so often.

This should hopefully help to mitigate the amount of bad servers in a client's list.

EDIT: Instead I think we should just automatically remove it from the list if we ever can't reach it. For example, if we are trying to send out a client's message to propagate on a server and it's not there, we should just remove that server from the list. Title changed appropriately.

Propagate messages over servers

with the current setup it turns out it's pretty easy to share messages over all servers. Making it one giant chat room instead of a bunch of smaller ones.

Don't try to write to log when it hasn't been created

if you exit before starting the server you get an error because the log hasn't been created/opened for writing yet.

Clients should get updated list when server is added/removed

I am kinda unsure about this one because I don't really know how often we want to be sending out the list.

if the current server the client is on crashes/disconnects, the client should be able to choose a new one. If the list hasn't been updated, or the client doesn't have a current list, it should just say "this server isn't available" and let the client choose a new one.

So really it's just a matter of how updated we want to be. This is low priority.

make sure threads don't hang

make sure when clients/servers connect and disconnect, that their threads are handled properly and killed.

stop auto toggle of post field on submit?

not sure how I feel about this yet.

Client should transparently re-connect to a new server when one goes down.

We can use the catch blocks for this as outlined in issue #7

remember previous urls

since the form uses ajax, it doesn't remember previous urls... dang.

change e.printStackTrace() in catch blocks to be more helpful

Right now for debugging I have e.printStackTrace() in most of the catch blocks. This should be changed to be more helpful in each case.

For example, In issue #5 we should:

-log a message saying a server isn't available or went down. (server.log.write("message"))
-remove the server from the list
-proceed without interruption

We can also use this to gracefully re-connect a client to a new server when their current one goes down.

save requests

make a button to save the current request to a nice shareable url (ex. curlosaur.us/bov8chq). This would also allow adding of social sharing buttons for facebook/twitter/etc.

-possibly add simple password protection option