Tempest

Tempest is a simple library for sending and receiving messages across any number of transports and dealing with them in a uniform manner. For example, you could receive the same message from a HTTP POST and from a TCP socket and from your perspective there would be no difference in handling it.

Features:

• Simple protocol definition
• Encryption
• Message signing
• Multiple message transports (raw tcp, http, etc.) feeding to the same message handlers
• Supports multiple Tempest protocols over a single connection

Getting Started

Protocol

The first thing we'll want to do is to define our protocol. We'll define a simple protocol that will simply broadcast a message to everyone else that's connected. We're only going to want reliable messages here, which we'll keep in mind for later.

As Tempest supports multiple protocols over a single connection, we'll give our protocol a unique identifier. 1 is reserved for Tempest, so we'll use 2.

static class SimpleChatProtocol
{
	public static Protocol Instance = new Protocol (2);

	static SimpleChatProtocol()
	{
		// We need to tell our protocol about all the message
		// types belonging to it. Discover() does this automatically.
		Instance.Discover();
	}
}

Each message type needs a unique identifier. Any ushort value will do, but personally I like to put the values in an enum to make things easier:

public enum SimpleChatMessageType
	: ushort
{
	ChatMessage = 1
}

We define messages by subclassing from Message and we'll need to tell it which Protocol it belongs to and its message identifier. To take care of this, I like to provide a small subclass of Message for the protocol:

public abstract class SimpleChatMessage
	: Message
{
	protected SimpleChatMessage (SimpleChatMessageType type)
		: base (SimpleChatProtocol.Instance, (ushort)type)
	{
	}
}

Now to define our actual chat message. To define a message type, you'll override WritePayload and ReadPayload. These methods pass in a IValueWriter and IValueReader respectively, which you'll use to serialize and deserialize your message.

public sealed class ChatMessage
	: SimpleChatMessage
{
	public string Message
	{
		get;
		set;
	}

	public override void WritePayload (ISerializationContext context, IValueWriter writer)
	{
		writer.WriteString (Message);
	}

	public override void ReadPayload (ISerializationContext context, IValueReader reader)
	{
		Message = reader.ReadString();
	}
}

And that's it for defining the protocol. Note: When using a platform where System.Reflection.Emit is unavailable, such as iOS or Windows Phone, you will need to use Protocol.Register and pass in your messages manually as Protocol.Discover is unavailable.

Client

For most applications, Tempest has a built in TempestClient class you can use to handle the fundamentals. We'll subclass to provide an easy method to send a chat message and add a listener for other's chat messages:

public sealed class ChatClient
	: TempestClient
{
	// We need to tell TempestClient what kinds of messages we're dealing
	// with. Earlier we decided that we only need Reliable messages here.
	public ChatClient (IClientConnection connection)
		: base (connection, MessageTypes.Reliable)	
	{
		// Here we setup a handler for any `ChatMessage`s that come through.
		this.RegisterMessageHandler<ChatMessage> (OnChatMessage);
	}

	// A simple event for brevity
	public event Action<string> ChatReceived;

	public Task SendChatAsync (string message)
	{
		var msg = new ChatMessage { Message = message };
		return Connection.SendAsync (msg);
	}

	private void OnChatMessage (MessageEventArgs<ChatMessage> e)
	{
		ChatMessage msg = e.Message;
		
		var received = ChatReceived;
		if (received != null)
			received (msg.Message);
	}
}

To connect to a server, we'll need to pick a transport. We'll use the built in network transport.

var connection = new Tempest.Providers.Network.NetworkClientConnection (SimpleChatProtocol.Instance);

var client = new ChatClient (connection);
await client.ConnectAsync (new Target ("hostname", port));

Server

For the server side of things, we also have a TempestServer class you can use to handle the fundamentals. We'll need to keep track of connections ourselves, where later on we may want to associate them with user data. So we'll subclass and add our connection list and a handler for ChatMessage:

public sealed class ChatServer
	: TempestServer
{
	public ChatServer (IConnectionProvider provider)
		: base (provider, MessageTypes.Reliable)
	{
		this.RegisterMessageHandler<ChatMessage> (OnChatMessage);
	}

	private readonly List<IConnection> connections = new List<IConnection>();
	private void OnChatMessage (MessageEventArgs<ChatMessage> e)
	{
		ChatMessage msg = e.Message;

		// Messages come in on various threads, we'll need to make
		// sure we stay thread safe.
		lock (this.connections) {
			foreach (IConnection connection in this.connections)
				connection.SendAsync (e.Message);
		}
	}

	protected override void OnConnectionMade (object sender, ConnectionMadeEventArgs e)
	{
		lock (this.connections)
			this.connections.Add (e.Connection);

		base.OnConnectionMade (sender, e);
	}

	protected override void OnConnectionDisconnected (object sender, DisconnectedEventArgs e)
	{
		lock (this.connections)
			this.connections.Remove (e.Connection);

		base.OnConnectionDisconnected (sender, e);
	}
}

To start the server, we'll need to provide a transport mechanism. You can add multiple transports to listen to, but for now we'll just add a network connection provider as we've already told the client to connect with it:

// NetworkConnectionProvider requires that you tell it what local target to listen
// to and the maximum number of connections you'll allow.
var provider = new Tempest.Providers.Network.NetworkConnectionProvider (SimpleChatProtocol.Instance, Target.AnyIP, 100);

var server = new ChatServer (provider);
server.Start();

Transports

There are currently two available transports:

• TCP
  • Supports reliable messaging
  • Supports encryption and signing
  • NetworkClientConnection for client connections
  • NetworkConnectionProvider for connection listeners
• UDP
  • Experimental
  • Supports reliable and unreliable messaging
  • Supports encryption and signing
  • UdpClientConnection for client connections
  • UdpConnectionProvider for connection listeners