Toy Messaging Protocol (tmp://)

A simple group chat messaging protocol

Features

Users can set unique usernames before joining a room
Text chat only for now
See who else is typing in real time

Under The Hood

Uses WebSockets as the underlying transport layer
Stateful protocol

Codebase

tmp_server.py - A reference implementation server, written in Python
tmp_client.js - A reference implementation frontend client written in JavaScript (obviously)
A basic frontend app that implements the protocol using static_app.py to serve frontend assets and the tmp server using app.py

Installation and Running

Clone this repo

git clone https://github.com/aymanimtyaz/ToyMessagingProtocol.git

Make a new python environment using your preferred environment tool (eg. venv, pipenv, etc.) and activate it

python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate

Install the required 3rd party dependencies for Python

pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Start the tmp server

python3 app.py

By default, the server runs on host '0.0.0.0' and port 5050, you can change this in app.py

from tmp_server import TMPServer


if __name__ == "__main__":
    # change the host and port below
    chat_server = TMPServer(host="127.0.0.1", port=8000)
    chat_server.start_server()

Start the static app server to serve frontend assets

python3 static_app.py

By default, the static app server runs on host '0.0.0.0' and port 5000, you can change this in static_app.py

from http.server import SimpleHTTPRequestHandler, HTTPServer


class MyHTTPRequestHandler(SimpleHTTPRequestHandler):
    def guess_type(self, path):
        if path.endswith('.js'):
            return 'application/javascript'
        else:
            return super().guess_type(path)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    # change the host and port below
    httpd = HTTPServer(('127.0.0.1', 8888), MyHTTPRequestHandler)
    httpd.serve_forever()

The app is now running and the chatroom can be entered and used via a browser :)