QUILT

A distributed chat client intended for the Sugar environment. Licensed under the MIT License

Build Status:

Master: Develop:

Core Ideas:

• Mesh network chat system
• Dynamic peer discovery over the meshnet
• Routing that tolerates unstable nodes that may go offline randomly
• Easy to use and operate

Protocol:

• protocol itself it loosely based on irc
• protocol segments are seperated using zeromq multipart messages (act just like a list)
• protocol template: [routing, destination, command, *args]
  • routing is a comma seperated list of unique node names ie: node1,node2,node3
• Currently Implemented:
  • join
  • part
  • server_connect
  • ping
  • pong
  • message

Routing Ideas:

• Routing is currently dumb, each message sent out has a comma seperated list of nodes it has been to, if a message returns to a node it has already been to, it is dropped

  Peer Discovery Ideas:

• Peer discovery is currently implemented using an avahi service

Internals

• There are 3 main threads
  • IncomingThread which puts incoming messages into the processing queue
  • ProcessorThread which takes messages from the processing queue and handles them using a QuiltProtocol object
  • OutgoingThreads are assigned one per server and take messages from a given queue and send them to their assigned server
• Incoming message --> proc-queue -> processor thread -> server Dependant Outgoing Queue

Dependancies:

pyzmq-static

Hacking

• clone it
• mkvirtualenv --system-site-packages quilt
• python setup.py develop
• quilt-console --help

Test Suite

Either use nose directly::

$ nosetests

Or use the setuptools command::

$ python setup.py test