I want to write a client program that communicates with the application server via standard TCP/IP. The client can speak to the application server and be authenticated by simply speaking in a specific text based protocol. The traffic will be encrypted, but there won't be username/password. If another application tries to communicate with the application server and if the application doesn't use the correct text based protocol, the application server will silently discard packets.
Waiting for suggestions.
You can use a simplified version of TLV (Tag Length Value).
The basic idea is to define a set of message types which are represented by a code of fixed size (the T for Tag). Depending the type of message the contents of it (the V for Value) can very so you specify its length (the L for Length) before the contents. The Length field also has fixed size
Suppose you have one message used to send user data to the server. You can define a message like:
0x01 0x0018 0x11 0x0003 tom 0x12 0x000F tom#hotmail.com
Tag: 0x10 User data. Length: 0x0018 Value: sub tags
Tag 0x11: user name Length: 0x0003 Value = tom
Tag 0x12: email. Length: 0x000F. Value = tom#hotmail.com
Edited:
I was about to forget: Merry Christmas :)
Take a look at BEEP.
You might also find some good examples at four.livejournal.com; he's gotten good results writing an HTTP parser using the Ragel state machine generator, and also by hand.
if your not comfortable with the limitited functionality (verbs) provided HTTP just add more verbs. This is what the REST architecture is for.
If you want to continue down your path of folly (your talking about reinventing HTTPS), then use protocol buffers to create a protocol -- it will save you hours of grief.
-- edit --
If your objective is to understand the programming involved with web-servers, you might want to read apache's code dissected by the FMC group into a collection of models. I have read this PDF multiple times -- it is an absolute gold mine.
All the other comments are good, and stuff like BEEP, or doing some custom TLV encoding can get you along way, as well as using something like Google protocol buffers, but none of these are what I'd really call real simple.
A very simple text based protocol could just use a new line as the message delimiter. This is how IRC does it. Its not the most efficient, but if your messages are reasonably small it could work quite well. You could also prefix your message with a much shorter line telling the receiver how long the next message is.
If you want to use a light framework, look at libevent. It can assist in your IO and do line delimited reading for you.
If the language (protocol) is not already determined for you, then that is what you should design first, or look at something that already exists - XML, JSON chunks, netstrings, etc.
You can look at some of the sample code from TCP/IP Sockets in C.
It has many examples of doing client/server communication in C. Without more details, it's difficult to know what you really want to handle...
For communicating between bespoke apps, you can just send your text format in TCP packets. You can use an extremely simple text format, but you should make sure that it starts with some text that clearly identifies to your server that it is a packet from your client, and not from an imposter. (Clearly this is not terribly good security, but that's not the point of your question).
A good place to start is to use XML for your text-based format. This is dead simple to write/read, and is flexible and extensible so you can easily add more information to your packets at a later date - the biggest thing you can get wrong is to use a communications format that can't be extended!
Once you have basic comms working, you can enhance the format to send more information, add encryption and other security measures, and consider moving to a binary (more secure, more compact and efficient) format. BUt you can work your way to this stage in small easy steps.
So the right direction:
Get two programs talking via TCP. Just a simple packet with the text "bob" in it is enough at this stage, just to verify that the messaging is working. There are any number of simple tutorials on the web to get this going, and it's just a few lines of code once you work out what's needed.
Then build your packets. Start with the simplest approach that gives you a unique ID (to verify that the packet is from the right program) and a means to add new data to the packet easily in future. Xml is ideal for this. Don't worry about security, just concentrate on the actual "conversation" you wish to convey between the programs - what data they wish to exchange and how to encode it.
Step by step improve the communications protcol until it achieves what you want - smaller, faster, binary, more robust, fault tolerant, secure, etc. Each of these steps will be an interesting little challenge and by the time you've done them all you'll have learned a lot.
Look at the chapter on text protocols in 'The Art of UNIX Programming' by E S Raymond. It covers a lot of the relevant ideas at a high level, with good examples, and explanations of why they are good examples. It mentions BEEP.
I've recently read a book on this topic. It's called "TCP IP Sockets in C", by Michael J. Donahoo and Kenneth L. Calvert. You if you can afford it, it's a nice tutorial/reference book to have.
If you'd like you can try create the client<->server pair in Java, as it is easier to grasp the idea, and then rethink the solution at a lower level in C.
Related
First i would like to apologize for my bad english, I wish you will understand my problem.
Here's my question, for my internship, I need to create a fonctionality that allows a caller to put his call in waiting, with a button, and to take the call back with that button again. And i think there's an option with SIP protocol that allows to do that, but i just can't find it, i searched in internet in some documentations, the only thing I might know and i'm not even sure is that it could be an option in a re-INVITE request, that can be send by the called or the caller one, if someone could help me ?
Thanks
The feature you are looking for is achieved by implementing the Call Hold Scenario on a SIP Call.
there are 3 ways to put the call on hold at the press of the button.
Generate a Re-INVITE SDP with SendOnly option - the answer shall contain a recvonly and in this case you can go ahead and inject hold music media through the rtp stream.
Sending inactive in the Re-INVITE SDP which basically puts the media inactive for the session. This is when no rtp exchange is desired.
Sending the 0.0.0.0 notation for the Re-INVITE SDP - This is the old deprecated format of call hold when IPV4 was still the norm [still is!!] but it makes sure the RTP doesn't have a ip to be sent.
All of these mechanisms rely on the basic methods and hence it shouldn't be very difficult to achieve using any client software.
I am using asterisk 11.9.0 and i want to generate an outgoing call.I found that for outgoing i have to make a .call file and place it in a var/spool/asterisk/outgoing.I am following the link below
http://the-asterisk-book.com/1.6/call-file.html#call-file-parameter
my code is same as given in the above link,the above example uses only single fixed number to call.
My problem is that
i have to generate an outgoing to a number fetched from database(outgoing to new number everytime),so how to write the code of .call file for multiple numbers outgoing and how to pass these numbers fetched from database to .call file from my extensions.conf
Is there any way to do that.
I am new to asterisk.
Any help would be appreciated.
You can use vicidial.org software to do that things.
Note, it is very bad idea do outboudn dialler-like app in asterisk without understanding asterisk logic and very-hi skills in programming/database.
For more info you also can use this page
http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/Asterisk+auto-dial+out
Might be easier using WombatDialer as it has a plain API where you can tell it what you want it to do and it will take care of the rest. We have a plain set up for outbound and it took maybe a couple of days from zero to what we have now. ViciDial would have been overkill.
On why rolling your own is not a great idea, the Wombat manual is quite clear: http://manuals.loway.ch/WD_UserManual-chunked/ch01.html#_why_was_wombatdialer_created
You could also use the AMI (Asterisk Manager Interface), would be easier to program with a deamon running in the back to control what gets dialed and the responses to those dials. Mora info here https://wiki.asterisk.org/wiki/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=4817239.
This is in C Language
I want to know how i can write a program to lookup all the input fields of a website. Any website. and then can fill them in. I can write the simple webbrowser in vbs but how can i analyse the input fields. even better would be is i could click the lookup field and it puts the name of it in a box..... that would be ideal.
Anyone can help? thanks :)
Are you sure you want to do this in C?
I ask because it is not easy. First of all, you need to be able to run the HTTP GET request against the webpage you wish to view. For this, you probably need libcurl; you definitely don't want to be writing from scratch at any rate.
Next, you need to process the html you get, finding all input fields. You do NOT want to do this using regular expressions, if anything for the sake of bobince's blood pressure. HTML is not a regular language is the bit you need to take away - you need an xml parser. Enter libxml. I'm sure there are other xml libraries out there, and even libraries for parsing html.
Finally, having done that (got the fields etc) you need to be able to populate them and submit the correct request as per the ACTION and METHOD parameters of the FORM.
This is of course assuming you know what the fields should be formatted with. And it also assumes nothing else is going on. If you have a javascript validated web form (I sincerely hope they're validating on the request too, but they might provide feedback via JS) you won't benefit from that (unless you're going to integrate JS, in which case you might as well write a browser).
This is not a trivial task and it is the reason there are accessibility standards for HTML, because otherwise it becomes tricky to interpret the form without human interaction.
Of course, this all assumes said html is well formed, which isn't always the case...
I might suggest another approach. BeautifulSoup is a well known Python web scraping library that works very well. Python as a language allows easier string manipulation too, which will dramatically cut down your development time. I'd suggest giving the need to use C some serious thought given the size and complexity of the task you want to undertake vs your need to get a result quickly. If you have a lot of time, by all means go for C.
I'm looking for a program or library that I could use for experimenting with board games (chess mostly, but not necessarily -- other similarly complex board games
are OK too). I'll test different game-playing algorithms.
This is what I need:
I'd like, if possible, to make my program play against
players like gnuchess and crafty, but also against itself
and against a human player;
It's OK if my player-program can communicate with the
"server" via TCP, but it would be even nicer if it had
a C interface (not C++, because then I'd have to write
a wrapper);
I may want to change the game rules (initial position of
pieces, number of pieces, and even movement rules);
Flexible (it's OK if the library/server validates
chess moves, for example, but I'd like such feature to be
optional because I will want to turn it off for some
experiments);
Free (I may want to get into the source code and maybe
change a few bits).
I'd be grateful if anyone could point me to such a library/server...
Thanks a lot!
P.S.: I wanted to include a "board-games" tag, but it seems that I'd need more reputation for that...
P.S. 2: I'd like to accept two answers (they're complementary). It's a pity StackOverflow doesn't allow that.
VASSAL is a cross-platform engine for playing board and card games over the internet. It is designed for allowing humans to play each other, but it is extensible enough you could add an AI player.
It is open-source and extremely customizable, people have created original games using it.
The XBoard protocol is the standard used between chess engines and graphic board front ends. It is plain text: as far as I can say there is no library.
Although seems complicated, the implementation is quite straightforward: a really small subset is needed in order to develop an usable application. The doc usually refers to the chess engine, but the same applies to the client side (reversing the side).
Hypothetically you can have the same connectivity of XBoard/Winboard, depending on how much protocol has been implemented. If you need some code to inspect, other than the classic Eboard and Xboard, there are a lot of examples around the web, and I mean really a lot of (it is a list of chess engines, but someone of them, such as babychess, is also a GUI frontend).
I'm not sure something like that exists yet.. by the way most of these topics are quite easy to develop by yourself:
vs player: just implement imput (you can use something simple like ncurses)
vs CPU: these games are called perfect information games and you can easily structure an AI with simple algorithms like minmax trees or negmax
to allow changing of rules it's more simple to hard code them (since every game could have its really different rules
for TCP support you should need to codify moves and separate GUI part from server part
If you are not going to test it with a large amount of different games projecting something really extendible (like an engine) will be a waste of time. Just concentrate on modifiable parts and program them wisely..
Actually some parts don't need to be generic: plan a good game protocol and then just care about events like unallowed move and similars..
Say I come up with some super-duper way of representing some data that I think would be useful for other people to know about and use. Assume I have a 'spec' in some form, even if it might not be a completely formal one: ie, I know how this file format will work already.
How would I then go about releasing this spec to get comments and feedback based on it? How would I get it 'standardised' in some form?
Specifying file formats is difficult. If the data you want to store is trivial, it tends to be trivial. In general however, this is hardly the case. You can use the RFC structure and keywords, but I always found specifying a fileformat in prose a slow, difficult and boring task, also because reading it is likewise difficult.
My suggestion, if you want to follow this way, is to focus on blocks of information. Most of the difficuly is for entities that are optional, and present only if another condition happens, so try to exploit this when partitioning your data.
The best spec, IMHO, is real code with an uberperfect testsuite.
As for standardization, if enough people use it, it becomes a de-facto standard. you don't need an official stamp for it, although when the format is used enough, you could benefit from an official mime type.
To talk about it, well, it depends. I found useful to talk in terms of "object oriented" entities, and also in terms of relationships. Database-like diagrams are very useful on this respect.
Finally, try to find a decent already standard alternative first, or at least try not to deal with the raw bits. There are a lot of perfect container formats out there that free you of many annoying tasks. The choice of the container depends on the actual type of file format (e.g. if you need encryption, interleaving, transactions, etc).
There are a couple of ways I'd go about it, I think.
First, determine if there's a standards body (like W3C, or IEEE) that might be related to your file format. If there is, pitch it to them. I have no idea how receptive they'd be though.
Second, a standard is useless if nobody is using it. Get some momentum behind it. Write a blog post, twitter and make a website about it. Link on programming.reddit.com, and slashdot. Describe it to your friends and colleagues. Post it here on SO, and ask for feedback.
HTH.