About Lichat-TCP-Client

This is a simple, threaded, TCP-based client for the Lichat protocol.

How To

Create a new client instance and pass it whatever settings you would like.

(defvar *client* (make-instance 'lichat-tcp-client:client))

Notable initargs of potential interest are:

• :username The name the client goes by on the network. Defaults to (machine-instance).
• :password The password of the user profile, if any. Defaults to NIL.
• :hostname The hostname to which the TCP socket should connect. The default is localhost.
• :port The port the TCP socket should connect to. The default is 1111.

Once a client exists, it can be started to attempt a connection to the server.

(lichat-tcp-client:open-connection *client*)

The client logs information via Verbose. If you set the REPL level to :trace you should see a bunch of status messages being printed every now and again.

Once you're done with the client, you can shut it down again.

(lichat-tcp-client:close-connection *client*)

Naturally this client doesn't really do much on its own. You can send updates to the server with s:

(lichat-tcp-client:s *client* 'create :channel "test")
(lichat-tcp-client:s *client* 'message :channel "test" :text "Hey.")

If you would like to respond to updates that the server sends back, you can define a method on process to do so.

(defmethod lichat-tcp-client:process ((update lichat-protocol:join) (client lichat-tcp-client:client))
  (lichat-tcp-client:s client 'message
                       :channel (lichat-protocol:channel update)
                       :text "What's up everyone?"))

See the Lichat protocol for more information on the available updates, their arguments, and their behaviour.

Mini Client

You can also try a minimal sample client by calling mini-client. The client is meant to illustrate simple use of the library, so make sure to check out its source file, mini.lisp.

Also See

• lichat-protocol The Lichat protocol specification.
• lichat-serverlib An agnostic implementation of the server-side protocol.
• lichat-tcp-server A basic, threaded, TCP-based implementation of a Lichat server.
• LionChat A Qt GUI client for a TCP server.