Rust Project Tutorial: Chat Application

In keeping with the other tutorials that we've already done, I decided that we should look at something that could be used on a network. I originally was going to do a simple web server application but I decided that that project would be better used later because there are tons of really nice libraries in Rust that help you create fairly robust and full featured web applications. I wanted the first few projects to not make use of any external libraries to show just how flexible the standard library of Rust truly is; I think that I have more or less succeeded in doing that.

In this particular project, we build two Rust projects; a server and a client. The server works by listening on a Tcp channel for any incoming messages that are streams of UTF8 characters. It uses non-blocking methods to parse these streams and then send them back to the client to show that it did receive the message. The client side works similar to a REPL (read evaluate print loop). You can enter in a message; that message is evaluated by the server then it is sent back to the client and you can enter in a new message. You may also enter the word :quit into the console to close out of the client. The server supports scaling and you could in theory use this particular code base with slight modifications on a real world server with thousands of clients. This scaling is possible because both the client and server makes use of multi-threading and channels.

While this project was arguably a little more simple then the one prior to it, I felt that it was worth doing because it allows us to explore the networking libraries that are baked into the Rust standard library in a way that is both interactive and visual. It was fun to live code this example and there were a few moments where I had to backtrack and stop the video to get the code working properly.

As an aside, I will probably have to start breaking some of these projects into multiple videos so that they aren't too long for the viewers. I do not want to create a project that is longer then 15 minutes on YouTube because I feel that that sort of removes some of the educational value from the video.

I hope you guys enjoy this video and I hope it also helps you better understand the language of Rust. There are many more projects to come.

Full Github Source Code is here