Simple netty chat server & client
- Right now just messing around with trying to get a simple echo server working on localhost.
- Managed to host the server on EC2 after toying around with Linux commands.
- Realized that we need to probably make this a REST API type of service for it to be cross platform.
- Made server theoretically capable of accepting WSS connections. Trying to test it but running into troubles with using a self-signed SSL certificate for the server.
- Current issue is that System.setProperty is not properly using the SSL certificate. System.getProperty returns null for "ssl" after setting. Might be issue with keystore, cert, password, or all three.
- Things are humming along nicely. Been awhile since I've developed due to business from work - got plenty of time now that summer is here!
- WSS connections work now. Made a hacky solution using my own SSL certificate.
- Server now takes messages from client then encapsulates it in a JSON object with the current time, placeholder for author of the message, and the message itself. Used the GSON library for this.
- Coming up next we need to make it so that each user can submit their username so that the server knows how to delegate the author of each outgoing message.
- After many trials and tribulations, we now have a working multi-person chat implementation! It's all very barebones, but anyone with the client who connects and sends a message will broadcast it to all other people who are connected!
- I struggled for a long time with trying to get the ChannelGroup working today. Everything added to ChatServerHandler is responsible for the multi-person implementation - the key step was making the ChannelGroup channels a static final variable as opposed to just final.
- This may have consequences down the road or might be completely not optimal, but it works for now and I'm sticking with it!
- With all that being said, I think that this update brings on the next version of this project...version 0.20!!
- Lots of stuff to mention. First and foremost, we've got a working browser client that can send and handle chat messages!
- Browser and Java client both convert timestamps to local machine time in whatever format the machine uses.
- Server timestamps UTC time in milliseconds so that clients are responsible for how to display the time.
- Not shown on the commits, but a lot of work has been done on the EC2 side of things, namely:
- Elastic IP Addresses: The EC2 instance now has its own IP address, so clients don't have to keep being updated to point to new domains for connections.
- Elastic File Systems & Apache Servers: Had to learn how to host an Apache server on my local machine and on EC2 using Amazon EFS in order to do proper testing of the browser client. Browser client is now hosted on an Apache server.
- Last but not least, made it so that the EC2 instance auto mounts the EFS and runs the httpd service (Apache) on boot.
- Coming up next, I want to make it so that users authenticate themselves for login. They should also receive the last 10 sent chat messages in their chat box when they log in.
- Redid a lot of the code for server and both clients to accommodate new feature: user authentication!
- Users now submit their username to the server after the WS handshake is complete. Once they submit a valid username (one that is not already in the list of connected users and with correct characteristics), the channel pipeline is replaced with one that enables the expected chat server functionality.
- With the implementation of connected users/verification, the server and client side code for sending/receiving messages is a lot more simplified. JSON messages are only sent from the server and can be parsed by the clients specifically for the purpose of chat transmission, which relieves a lot of the worry that I had before of having to parse JSONs of different formats in different ways.
- Updates to browser interface because we no longer send a username with every message request. This also reduces the payload of chat transmission between server and client!
- Up next, I want to implement a username/password system server side. After that's working, let's try using a database!
- Successfully set up a local Mongo server but I'm thinking relational might be better for storing usernames/passwords.
- Trying to figure out how to do lobbies - Mongo? Server side? Right now I want the user to query a lobby list before adding the actual ChatServeerandler to the pipeline, which makes sense because the ChatServerHandler references a ChatGroup. Lobbies should be static or instantiated on server start? Lots to think about here.
- Decided that Mongo would not be suitable for my needs here. We should definitely have a schema for usernames/passwords.
- Getting a little more familiar with Postgres and Argon2. I feel good about the ability to add and verify user logins with the database.
- I want to perform a restructuring so that we perform the handshake AFTER successful authentication. This is going to involve moving around a lot of code all around everywhere, but it's necessary. Firstly, we don't want to have the overhead of performing a handshake every time someone wants to login - that should only happen if we actually have somebody who is in the system. Secondly, we can send credentials more securely if we don't use text websockets to send in user credentials.
- Looks really annoying to do, but let's get started! It's not gonna fix itself after all.
- Better part of the last three days was simply spent trying to get a serialization library to work. Couldn't get Flatbuffers to work at first (it was working the whole time), so I tried out Capnp which was an absolute disaster. Capnp has NO Java documentation and I don't even think it's functional.
- Tried Flatbuffers again and realized that the Flatbuffers was compiling but outputted to a different folder instead of the same folder as the flatc binary (the only place I was looking!)
- Been working on creating a schema that will fit the needs of the server. Made a basic schema, credentials, that handled usernames/passwords. Most of today was spent expanding, testing, and writing a codec for that schema, which is why most of the recent activity has been in FlatBuffersTesting and FlatBuffersCodec.
- I have come to like Flatbuffers and I think the codec is finished for the most part now, which means I can finally get back to the networking side of things! Learned a lot about writing schemas, codecs, and had to do a little review on generics to write the method that converts ByteBuffers into the different objects that can lie in one of the FlatBuffers Messages.
- Long time since I made an update. The past week was vacation + an illness beginning on Thursday, so not as many commits as I would have liked to get in. Consequently most of my work has been on the browser client.
- Also, now that I know how to do longer commit messages my dev log stuff has kind of been relegated to my commits.
- In terms of new things, I've got a very rudimentary understanding of Angular and have even made a controller that is used for pings and checking the status of a WebSockets connection, dynamically updating the view depending on the status.
- Auth on both browser/java clients works and registration needs to be done. Also, the App section of this should be started as there is not much point in continuing to use a Netty client with just Java.
- Finally recovering for my illness so I'm hoping for a lot more changes to come in the near future!
- Updated version
- A picture is worth a thousand words! ui-router shenanigans.
- Very depressed to learn that the project is labeled as Javascript. My code base has been overtaken by JS! Mostly due to the inclusion of the js libraries, I think.
- Been a while since I had an update. Will update this with a webm to show exactly what we've got so far.