SUBook – a Facebook like Social Networking Application
project description:
In this project, you are going to develop a social networking application called SUBook (an oversimplified version of Facebook) by implementing client and server modules. (i) The Server module manages the storage of posts, posts feed, and friendships between the users, and (ii) the Client module acts as a user who shares posts, adds and removes other users from his/her friendship, and views posts of other users. The server listens on a predefined port and accepts incoming client connections. There might be one or more clients connected to the server at the same time. Each client knows the IP address and the listening port of the server (to be entered through the Graphical User Interface (GUI)). Clients connect to the server on a corresponding port and identify themselves with their usernames. Server needs to keep the usernames of currently connected clients in order to avoid the same name to be connected more than once at a given time to the server. On the server side, there is a predefined database of users which are presumed to be registered to the social network so that you do not need to implement any registration process between a client and the server (actually it was done in HW1). That user database has been provided to you in package with the term project as a textual file named user-db.txt together with this guide document. You should parse this file in order to load the usernames in your server program; we can use a different file in the demos, so please do not hardcode the usernames in your code. For simplicity, a client, whose username is in the user database, will be able to connect by providing his/her username only (i.e. no password or other type of security). Once connected, he/she will act as mentioned in the rest of this document.