Arek Zen

CSC209 - Location Server

Assignment 4 for CSC209 at University of Toronto in Software Tools and Systems Programming

Introduction

One of the interesting features of MSN Messenger is that you can see if a person is online and be able to look up their personal status . Some fields can be used to indicate a status such as : at work or at home

The task in this assignment is to write a server and a client that allows user to register with the server and see which other registered users are on .

Specification

A user will run the heythere client and connect to a heythere-server . Every N seconds, the server will send to the client a list of users that are currently registered and their status.

Client

The client first sends the user name to the server. The second message the client sends to the server is the location of the client . Other messages can be sent to the server. User can change their user name, the location and it may add a message tag .

Every time interval in seconds, the server will send a complete list of the currently logged on users. The client will print these out to stdout .

Each message has a strict format described as following:

First 3 characters describe the type of message the client is sending followed by a space and then the content of the message .

Location: usr

Hostname: loc

Message: tag

Server

Server is written to support up to 30 clients at a time. It uses select to multiplex between different clients. If the command-line arguments -t <time interval> are not given, the default value for the number of seconds between printing to the clients is 10 seconds . Information will be written on line per client in the following format:

<user name> <location> <message tag>

To handle client data, the server collects the information from all connected clients.

Zip archive is located here: http://zenebo.com/csc209a4.zip