My team is currently working on a simple networking project that includes chat room source code with file transfer. We would like to know where we can start or find information for our source code. Any information would be appreciated. thanks
My team is currently working on a simple networking project that includes chat room source code with file transfer. We would like to know where we can start or find information for our source code. Any information would be appreciated. thanks
Well a lot of it depends on your design. For the basics, if you aren't already, you need to be quite familiar with working with sockets (I recommend Beej's Guide - google for it, it's popular). For the file transfer, you could just have clients connect directly to eachother, in which case I doubt you'd need much more than a decent knowledge of standard C and your sockets library, but if you'd like to have users upload to a central server and other users download from that server, than you may want to use FTP, or something similar. You can find information on the protocol from w3.org or wotsit.org (along with many alternatives).
Good luck. If you'd like to elaborate on what you've got to work with so far, we could provide much better help.
You didn't mention what your target environment is. If it is Windows, then I would suggest that you take a look at DirectX. More specifically, DirectPlay for the GUI chat room piece of your project.
DirectPlay is primarily designed for multi user networked game play. But it has a lobby feature which is Microsoft terminology for chat room. The lobby is where players hang out before joining the networked game action. You can use this lobby feature to design your chat room.
I think I can provide you some foundation source code based on the lobby feature for your GUI chat room if Windows is your target environment