cadebward / netchat

TCP chat server in Golang

netchat

A small TCP server for handling chat.

Running

$ go run main.go

$ telnet 127.0.0.1 3000

$ telnet 127.0.0.1 3000

Known Bugs

• If your client receives a message while you are typing, your message is broken up into multiple lines

Approach

The approach I took was largely driven around the main parts of the application that I could see:

1. The client
2. The server
3. The main initialization of the application

main.go is the file that gathers the configurations and starts up the entire applications. server/client.go is the code that drives the behavior for each individual client that connects to the server. In this file you’ll find convenient methods for sends messages and receiving messages from a single client. In server/server.go I wrote the glue to tie many clients together. server.go utilizes all the convenience methods in client.go to broadcast messages to all clients, send messages to singles clients, and relay each client’s messages to all the other clients. I spent a good amount of time really trying to make these boundaries as clean as I could, and I feel like it really paid off in making the code easy to follow.