Let's expand on out last example and add nickname support to our chat server. The use case is essentially the same, expect that when you run the client, you should pass an argument indicating your nickname. When the client sends information to the server, it should include the given nickname as well as the message. The server should then send the message and the nickname to each client and the client should print something like 'username> this is a message'
You can build up on the solution for problem 2 to solve this problem. One important thing to note is that we now need to send
structured information to the server in order to be able to send more than just the message. We can of course use JSON for
this, but instead of encoding and decoding the messages everytime we send info to the server, we can use a module to help
us out with that. It's called duplex-json-stream and you can use it to wrap a stream so that it turns it into an object
stream. So for example if you do this
socket = jsonStream(socket)
Now you can do the following
socket.write({username: username, message: message})
and when you do
socket.on('data', function(data) {...})
data is an object instead of a buffer.
You obviously need to use this module in both the client and the server.
Open 3 terminals, run
node server.js
on one of them and
node client.js
on the other 2. Clients should be able to chat and you should be able to see the nicknames of the clients.
When you are done click here to go to the next exercise