Haver Server

What is it?

Haver is a local chat program. The server creates a group for users in a specified radius, so that users in a small area can talk to each other.

But why would you want to talk to people in the same room?

Haver is anonymous, which means that nobody in the room knows who you are.

When you join a room you are given a Monopoly piece, but you never sign up or choose a username. Because of this, you can identify people's messages as being posted by that person, but not who that person is.

We think that this will be used mostly by students in lectures and classes, and by people at conventions, but it can be used anywhere that people are: theme parks, shop queues, coffee shops, etc.

How's it work?

Haver is split into a server and client model. We considered using a form of communication like bluetooth or local Wi-Fi, but these technologies limit the size of the network to the range of this signal. Since our server creates a virtual room, the size of the room can be anything we want!

The Haver server (this repo) is written in Java, and the client is currently a website, but soon we will start working on mobile clients to offer a more seemless experience for mobile users.

The client-server interaction uses WebSockets, which means that communications are near instant, and we are using the HTML5 Geolocation API to keep the current client implementation simple.

Sounds cool, let me work on it!

How to build?

We're using gradle, import the project into your favourite IDE, use gradle build to build the project, and gradle run to run the project.

Make your changes, and then send us a pull request. If you didn't break the build, and it seems like a nice change, then we'll accept it!

To access the server which you're running you will need to use a client. At the moment, the only client is the web client, which is in active development.