How the client can know when the server send a message? - c

I will try to express it as good as a can. I need to create an online chat but NOT a group chat, but a private one.I mean i need a server where a lot of client can connect and each one of them can send a message to another client(if he knows his IP or Username). If the receiver is offline he will receive the message when he will connect to the serve(the easy part). If he is online he could do 2 jobs:
1.Send message to another client
2.Receive a message from another client.
My problem is how to interupt the sending process and tell the client that he has a new unread message?
I am looking up to use the SIGIO signal,but i am really not familiar.Am i in the right way?
PS:The server is running in an embedded system.

Related

Distinguish sender from receiver with Socket.io

I have built a web application using JavaScript stack (MongoDB, ExpressJS, AngularJS, NodeJS). The registration works, the authentication works, the chat is which is using Socket.io works but I need a way of distinguishing which client is sending and which client is receiving the message in order to perform further functions with the user's data.
P.S. Since this is a project that I can not publish there are no code snippets in my post, hopefully it is alright
The ultimate design will depend on what you are trying to achieve. Is is "a one-to-one chat" service or maybe a "one to many broadcast". Is the service anonymous? How do you want users find each other? How secure does it need to be?
As a starting point I would assign a unique identifier (UID) to each connection (client). This will allow the server to direct traffic by creating "conversation" pairings or perhaps a list of listeners (subscribers) and writers (publishers).
A connected user could then enter the UID of a second connected user and your service can post messages back and forth using the uid pairing.
conversation(user123,user0987)
user123 send to user0987
user0987 send to user123
or go bulletin board/chat room style:
create a "board" - just a destination that is a list of all text sent
user123 "joins" board "MiscTalk"
user0987 "joins board "MiscTalk"
each sends text to the server, server adds that text to the board and each client polls the board for changes.
Every Socket can send or recieve, your program must track "who" is connected on a socket and direct traffic between them.
I think a fine way to handle the clients is creating a Handler class, a Client object and create a clientList in the handler, this way is easier to distinguish the clients. Some months ago I built a simple open source one-to-one random chat using socket.io, and here are the handler and the client class.
I hope this example can help you.
1.) Create a global server variable and bind connections property to it and whenever the authentication is true ,store socket_id against the id(user_id etc) which you get after decoding your token.
global.server=http.createServer(app);
server.connections={};
If server.connection hasOwnProperty(id) then use socket emit to send your message ,
else store the socket_id against your id and then send your message.
In this way you just need to know the unique token of the target user to send the message.
2.) You can also use the concept of room
If authentication is true use
socket.room=id ; socket.join(id)
when sending message use client.in(id).emit("YOUR-EVENT-NAME",message)
Note: Make your own flow , this is just an overview of what I have implemented in the past.You should consider using Redis for storing socket_ids.

Use of fork command in C in a chat application

I have a problem in this question, please anyone can guide me
Communication between client and server in C ubantu:
Client will send message and address of another client to server and server will forward that message to that client. Other client will reply to server in a same format and server will forward that message to specified client.
I have to use fork command in this Question.
How I will send address to server and message together?
I don't think you should use fork in this case. You can keep an array containing your client's sockets with a unique ID, which can be the address, and forward the message you receive from a client to the one with the ID specified in the original message. The select() system call can be useful when monitoring an array of file descriptors.

Client Server program using messages queues

I am trying to design a Client Server kind of application in which my Server is a daemon that accepts client requests, send client's data over a serial channel to the other side(which is an MCU and its firmware will reply to the Server request over the same serial channel). My client can be a CLI application or any other system program.
My idea of design is -
Use message queues for communication between Client and Server since this is a local application and message queues are bidirectional and fast.
Implement a LIBRARY that acts as an interface between multiple clients and the server. This basically does the stuff of packetizing client data into a message(own defined protocol), create message queues, connect to server, send/receive data and then pass it to the respective client(using call backs). This library also exposes API that can be used by clients. Thus this library gives me the flexibility to add support for any new clients keeping the server program unchanged.
Server gets the data over serial from other side and passes it to the library over message queue. The library uses callbacks to send data to the client.
EDIT:
I am thinking of creating Message queues on the fly when any client requests arrive. If I do this, how does the Server daemon(which has already started at linux boot up) gets information about this message queue? Does the message queue has a name that is persistent across and used by other programs? I want to implement clients that will be blocked until it gets response from the server.
Could you guys please review this design and tell me whether my approach is correct. Please reply if you have any other recommendations.
Thanks in advance.

Designing an interactive client

I'm trying to design a client program that connects to a remote server and sends various messages / request to it and expects responses based on the requests sent (for e.g. send a join message and wait for a response, then either query for some resource or ask for some info etc. in no particular order).
I would like to design the client such that the user can choose any of the possible requests to send after joining the server (after completing one request and getting a response if any it should allow them to carry out further requests or quit). Something like a menu of actions that it returns to each time (while also waiting for any data from the server)? However I can't seem to figure out how to this could be done. Is there a way to do this (preferably without getting into forking/threads)?
Any inputs on this would be really great. TIA
I would start off with a simple chat server to get your feel for socket programming. Google Example TCP Chat Server or something, you'll end up with simple examples like this: http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~almeroth/classes/W01.176B/hw2/examples/tcp-server.c .. once you are able to telnet to your server and read/write to your clients, you should be able to progress from there and perform actions when your clients issue a specific command and that sort of thing.

is it possible to send a not requested info or command to clients in silverlight?

in a Silverlight application, we used to send requests from client to server and receive its response.
is it possible to send an information from server to client which is not waiting for? for example server ask client to update a text in a special text box and so on. "an info or known command which may come to client any time and is not a response to the client's request"?
You can use Duplex Services for this.

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