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I've been super busy as of late - A quick catch up (Part 2)

January 25, 2021 — Tristan B. Kildaire

Continuing where we left...

So BobonoNET is now growing and we have a few users (most albeit on a bridge) but some new native users I am convincing to join now are coming on - which is great! As for CRXN we have had users, like Chris, join from Germany, and Clickme.sh from India, soon the US too with some other folks!

Now let's move onto the next things!

Bester

So I started work on what I see as a more modular XMPP which I call Bester. I have written quite a few blog posts on it (look here, here and here). And basically what Bester provides is an authenticated mechanism whereby a client can send some data into the Bester daemon, then message handlers (which are separate processes that connect over UNIX domain sockets to the Bester daemon) will handle specific messages of specific types and then produce an output for them, basically your message goes into the server (the Bster daemon) -> to a message handler -> and then the output from the message handler can be directed either back to the users on the same server, users on the same server and remote servers or, and get this, back into another message handler (and then the same process applies).

With such a system I am to make some cool IoT systems, filtering systems and connected-goodness - I also plan to make a chat program that works on top of Bester as I think that will work out well!

There is a rough working version (I mean it isn't that bad, everything works but I want to make it more thread safe etc. and cleaner - the implementation) whereby you can do pretty cool things in terms of topologies of Bester daemons and moving messages throughout them!

Butterfly - electronic mail simplified

I don't think I have yet posted much on Butterfly or at all - only really on Mastodon! Now I have always wanted to have email but in an easier to setup way and something that just worked in a more simpler way - now I haven't looked at the email spec but the fact setting up proper email requires two daemons (one for SMTP and one for IMAP) was already enough for me so I said, in usual Deavmi terms "fuck it, I'm reinventing the wheel - except this time it won't be a bicycle but a unicycle as was the bare minimum requirements (wait until you see how mail filtering is proposed to work).

So I started work on it and now the basic functionality is all there including inter-server mail exchange the only things left to do are thread safety, performance increasing via tristanable and code clean up and a few more functions like mail deletion, folder deletion etc. but the mail aspect of sending and receiving and checking your inbox and fetching mail are all there!

So what I am to do with mail filtering is to have some generic protocol that others can use to build filtering daemons - yes I lied - filtering requires another daemon but at least you'll be able to disable this feature -_-. I plan on making Bester apart of this aspect but not bundled in anyway and separate - I want to maintain the UNIX philosophies - do one thing and do it well!

tristanable - tag-based messaging library

Now for both Bester and Butterfly I want to make things more job-oriented than based around a simple state machine. By this I mean that if I have two jobs, job 1 and job 2, then rather than making it such that I make a request from the client -> server to start job 1 and then await the completion and result from server -> client and then do the same for job 2, I want to submit both jobs, job 1 and then job 2 and as soon as one finishes then I want to receive its result - now one can program this but the thing is that means programming the same thing time and time again for several programs, just like bformat (which you will see in the next section), so I decided to write a library to do this for me.

tristanable is for the client side, obviously with worker threads for each job on the server-side this is easy to accomplish without a library - all the library does is listen for incoming results and store them in an array that you can access using functions like `.receive(tag=1)` (where tag is the same concept as job) which, if the result for the tag/job 1 is not in the array it will then loop and check but if it does find it sometime during that loop, or even before the first iteration then the `.receive` function will return immediately - this is the crux of tristanable.

bformat - socket encoding/decoding payload-management thing

This library, which should be renamed, basically manages receiving and sending of messages in the bformat format which consists of [ <---- 4 bytes (specifying size in little endian encoding) ----> | <---- payload (n bytes) ----> ].

I use this in all of my networking projects - at least so far.


And that's a wrap!

I should mention also that I started a PeerTube channel whereby I post computer builds and networking server-ish stuff - so check that out if you will!
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