A TCP/IP chat room server application which can handle multiple clients. The server can receive multiple client requests at the same time and entertain each client request in parallel. The client makes use of ncurses library for terminal manipulation for user interface and asynchronous input. Thus, server responses and input never interfere with each other.
The chat_server.cpp file contains class definition of TCP_Server and Logger classes. The constructor of TCP_Server takes argument int port and sets up a TCP chat room server at that port. Logger class is used to log the events of the server with thread-safety and verbosity.
The server listens on the defined port waiting for new connections, and for each connection, it spawns a new thread which receives messages from the new client. For every message received from a client, the server broadcasts the message to each connected client. It does this so by maintaining an array of connected clients. After a connection has been closed by a client, the main thread spawns a detached thread to remove the stored client, and any other leftovers.
The client uses ncurses library to allow asynchronous input from the user, while receiving messages from the for standard output. It also provides the user a better user interface. chat_client.cpp contains class definitions for TCP_Client,ClientWin and ClientApp. TCP_Client provides interfaces to communicate with a server, ClientWin instantiates the terminal for ncurses usage, and provides methods to read input from the input window, along with write for thread-safe output in the output window. ClientApp is a composition of TCP_Client and ClientApp to unify the interfaces of both classes.
The server can be compiled using:
g++ chat_server.cpp -o chat_server -lpthread
The client can be compiled using:
g++ chat_client.cpp -o chat_client -lpthread -lncurses
By default the server runs on port 3491, which can be changed by simply changing the value passed into the constructor of TCP_Server class in main(). To run the client 2 additional arguments namely hostname and port are required. Example usage includes ./chat_client 127.0.0.1 3491.