Distributed Chat Server

Raft-based distributed chat application.

The architecture of the system is shown in following figure. Both Client-Server and Server-Server communication will take lace via TCP connections using JSON payloads. This system uses raft and gossip based failure detection system for the operations.

The chat server can further be decomposed into 3 primary components; (1) Client component, (2) Raft component and (3) Gossip component. The Client component will handle chat messages and general client interactions, while contacting the leader when carrying out operations that change system state (e.g., creating rooms). The Raft component will keep the server state up-to-date with the system state. (Using the Raft protocol) Finally, the gossip component will track unreachable servers via heartbeat counters. The client component uses this collected information to hide servers that are out of reach.

Architecture	Components

Building

Folowing should launch the server on port 4444.

./manage.sh build
./manage.sh run -s MAIN -f default.tsv

To Run the chat client,

./manage.sh client -h localhost -p 4444 -i adel

Checkstyle

This project uses Checkstyle for CI. Use following command to check errors prior to sending a pull request.

./manage.sh check