Chattam is a toy project to play with networking, async, and channels. It consists of a client and server which communicate by sending JSON over a TCP connection.
The server spawns a new task for each incoming connection, and sends the message it receives to all other
connected clients over a tokio broadcast channel.
The TUI client spawns a task to listen for new messages from the server and sends them over a channel to the main thread to update the displayed messages and any other state.
The server is very straightforward to start; simply run cargo run --bin server in a terminal and
it will run and print out it's listening address.
The client is similar, but because it logs to stdout you'll need to redirect it to a file or it will
write over the UI. With the server running, in a separate terminal run cargo run --bin tui 1>/some/file
to redirect the logs to /some/file; I like to tail -f the logs while running to view them.
Run another client in a 3rd terminal window to begin messaging back and forth.
- Add ability to create/join different channels
- Add authentication
- Add message persistence (probably Postgres)
- Configurable server address for client
- Handle multiple clients better instead of using a
broadcast::channel() - Show messages you've sent as the client
- Better error handling instead of
.unwrap() - Add some GIFs to the README
- Create a GUI client (probably
egui) - Make the TUI client log to a file directly instead of
stdout - Actually accept and use a username from the client