Re: client-server chat appl

hhdangar@gmail.com wrote:

Please put a capital letter at the beginning of each sentence,
and note that your post was about two distcinctly different
questions. They might be summarised..

- tips for cross-platform Java development
- and your current title "(writing a) 'client-server chat appl'"

Since the only client-server app. I've written was a project
for college, I'll steer clear of that and instead address the
'x-plat' component.


The basic areas involved in writing a client-server
chat application might be ..

- threads
- sockets
- GUI toolkits
- I/O (streams and files)
(..umm) Actually I thought there were more, when I started
writing that list, but I think that's it!

Short of a JVM bug, or using all '64000' of the sockets offered
by a spefific platform, I cannot imagine you will run into any
cross-platfrom problems as a result of either threads or sockets.

GUI toolkits? If you use Swing with the default (Metal) PLAF,
same deal - it is all very platform agnostic, and should work
'out of the box' on any supported platform.

The I/O is perhaps the area where you might hit the
most problems with cross-platform compatibility, but
even then, most of the I/O classes are designed to handle
the variants.

1) E.G. One platform might use a different 'endianness'
to storing basic data.

2) E.G. OS's usually have different path separators to
specify paths to files and resources. The 'File' constructor
has a form that automatically inserts the correct file separator
[ new File(File parent, String name) ] for you - though if you want
to build up paths yourself, you can always find the path separator
for the current OS by calling System.getProperty("path.separator").

OK - now that I've finished that, I have the vague feeling there
are a dozen or so other little niggling things might trip
you up when developing this cross-platform application,
but I cannot think of them right now.

Maybe it would help if you mentioned the classes and
packages you intend using for your project?

Andrew T.