Gevent chat

An example UDP chat client and server using Gevent and urwid.

The main purpose of this program is to experiment with gevent's sockets and DatagramServer and urwid/gevent integration. It's very much a toy/work in progress and is not an example of best practices.

Getting started

Clone and start a virtualenv. Install the requirements:

$ pip install -r requirements.txt

Start the server (modify port in the source code if needed):

$ python server.py

Start a client (change server and port in source if needed):

$ python client.py <nickname>

Features

• Multiple client chat over UDP
• Scrolling message pane (click on it and use the up/down arrows)
• Change nickname using /nickname <newnickname>
• Quit using /quit or ctrl-C

Mandatory screenshot

The screenshot below shows the author chatting with himself:

TODO

• Client heartbeat to reconnect when server is restarted and to garbage collect old clients.
• Better message format. Currently the record separator character is used.
• It feels slow, maybe because of urwid. Do some profiling.
• More server features like chat rooms, private messages etc
• Think about security :D
• Handle client connection state better
• ...