On Sunday, 6 November 2016 at 06:02:48 UTC, Era Scarecrow wrote:
So I've got a project where I want to create basically a
decentralized chat program where every program is a host and a
client. When you connect all connections can go through to
route the chat to everyone else.
So to make this work I've looked over the sockets package and
I don't quite follow how you'd make it so it works a lot like a
web browser, aka when you get a connection you redirect to a
different port so you have 1 listening port for new connections
so it can act as a server. What settings or configuration would
I need to be able to do that?
Web browsers do redirects at the application level. It's in
HTTP, which is a protocol built on top of the layer sockets
provide.
It sounds like you want to do the same thing: design a protocol
that includes some kind of message that's agreed to mean, "Yo,
make a new connection on this port." Basically, any
off-the-shelf textbook on network protocol design will help you.
One thing I can tell you now, though, is that NATs will be your
big problem if you try to deploy your system for real. Most
machines still use IPv4 and don't have publicly accessible IP
addresses, so they use network address translation to access the
internet. Quirks of different NAT implementations cause huge
pain to everyone who tries to deploy a peer-to-peer system.
But don't let me put you off :)
