Tin Can Communicator

Command line chat app built in Golang 1.13 with tcp sockets and a custom binary protocol.

Currently a work in progress.

Features

• Chat with other people using the command line!
• 256 Chat rooms available. (numbered 0-255)
• 200 character limit per message
• Chat messages are only broadcast to members of the same chat room.
• Utilizes a TLV style binary protocol to encode and decode messages.

Basic Usage

Server

1. Build and run the executable using go run config.go -mode=server -port=####
2. When you want to stop the server, simply press ctrl+c. (This will disconnect all clients immediately!)

Client

1. Build and run the executable using go run config.go -mode=client -address=your.address.goes.here:####
2. Enter a username (3+ characters).
3. Enter a desired chat room number (0-255).
4. Chat!
5. When you're finished, simply press ctrl+c or the escape key to quit.

Extra Repos

Here are some other repositories that I created to test out new libraries, or explore some concepts

• https://github.com/Mecope1/serialization_comparison: Compares benchmarks for encoding and decoding the chat app's TLV protocol to Json and MessagePack for some sample payloads.

• https://github.com/Mecope1/go-tui-testing: Sandbox where I played around with the Termui library to see how I could use it in the chat app.

To Do

• Add in additional tests
• Make error handling even more robust
• Allow users to easily join a different room
• Integrate a database to store chat logs
• Setup auth system, allowing persistent users
• Allow users to send requests to my unit-converter api/ web app from the chat app

References

These are places that I had read from and that I found very helpful in building this.

• gobyexample.com
• golangbot.com
• https://searchnetworking.techtarget.com/tutorial/Protocols-Lesson-2-Binary-and-the-Internet-Protocol
• https://levelup.gitconnected.com/binary-encoding-of-variable-length-options-with-golang-4481ff59e767
• https://www.thepolyglotdeveloper.com/2017/05/network-sockets-with-the-go-programming-language/
• https://medium.com/johnshenk77/create-a-simple-chat-application-in-go-using-websocket-d2cb387db836
• https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/campbell/cs60/socketprogramming.html
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2681267/what-is-the-fundamental-difference-between-websockets-and-pure-tcp?lq=1
• https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmfYeDhGH9bZzihBUDEQbCbTc5k5FZKURMUoUvfmc27BwL/architecture/protocol_layers.html
• https://www.embeddedrelated.com/showthread/comp.arch.embedded/178636-1.php