Can/Should Helios be used to create a UDP server ?

[Ashutosh Raina]

First, should Helios be used to do the above (I think so)? My intention is to understand if I have the right tool for my job before I begin exploring this.I do understand that the documentation will come soon esp. around Reactors.

[Aaron Stannard]

Hi Ashuto,

Yes it can! We have a working sample of a Udp socket server inside the "UdpReactorServer" sample project: https://github.com/Aaronontheweb/helios/tree/master/samples/Helios.Samples.UdpReactorServer

Every Helios socket server (reactor) or client (connection) consists of the following parts:

1. A dedicated thread-pool for processing inbound and outbound requests, using C# socket best practices;
2. A MessageEncoder and MessageDecoder for encoding and decoding messages on the network - by default we use a FrameLengthEncoder and FrameLengthDecoder, which appends a 4-byte header to beginning of the message describing how many contiguous bytes are included in this message.
3. Event hooks for important network events such as received data, connections (yes,even for UDP - we track when data has been received from a new IP:PORT and fire the OnConnect event then), and network errors.

If you want to try out the UDP Reactor included in that example, I recommend also running our UdpRawSocket example in parallel which uses the same encoding / decoding that the server does: https://github.com/Aaronontheweb/helios/tree/master/samples/Helios.RawUdpSocket

[Ashutosh Raina]

Just finished getting the samples to work together 👍

[Aaron Stannard]

👍

[Aaron Stannard]

Feel free to post any more questions here!