Creating a Multi-Language, Serverless Chat Program - Part 1: Protocol Design

Written By: Nathan Baker

- 11 Aug 2006 -

Description: In order to explore how different languages approach GUI programming, network sockets, and object-oriented concepts, we will embark on a journey in creating a serverless chat protocol, and clients for it in many different languages. This is the first installment, where I describe the protocol and the project.

  1. Introduction
  2. Protocol Overview
  3. The Distributed Protocol
  4. The Network Format
  5. Outro

Outro

I admit, this wasn't very fun. It's fun to just sit down and hackety-hack until you have a working program. But when you're starting a large project, design is critically important. And though writing one client/server pair is not a very large project, writing many of them in many different languages is a fairly large project for a single person. Make sure to join me next time, where I'll start us off writing the first instance of our program in C#. I have a few other languages in mind, but if you have one you'd particularly like to see a client for, e-mail me and I'll consider it (no promises; I don't particularly want to learn how to do network programming in FORTRAN or COBOL (if that's even possible) just because one of you jokers asks me to). I can be reached, as always, at [nathan.interlude@gmail.com] for suggestions, questions, comments, or requests for financial help from rich Nigerian royalty. Code to live!

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