Gaurav

Creating a chat application using Socket in Silverlight

Here I will explain how to communicate with the server using the Socket class. The socket class allows Asynchronous communication between the client and server. This application will show how to share data in real-time in two different browser windows using Silverlight.

This application will contain two parts:

1. Server application using Ruby.
2. Client application using C# in Silverlight.

Creating the server application:

Making a multi-threaded server application in ruby is really easy and that is the reason I chose Ruby to create the server in least amount of time possible.

   1: require 'socket'

   2:  

   3: HOST = 'localhost'

   4: PORT = 4505

   5:  

   6: server = TCPServer.new(HOST, PORT)

   7:  

   8: # array to store all the active connections

   9: sessions = []

  10: while (session = server.accept)

  11:   # push the current session(socket) in the array

  12:   sessions << session

  13:   # initialize a new thead for each connection

  14:   Thread.new(session) do |local_session|

  15:     # each time a client sends some data send it to all the connections

  16:     while(true)

  17:       data = local_session.gets

  18:       sessions.each do |s| 

  19:         begin

  20:           s.puts data

  21:         rescue Errno::ECONNRESET

  22:           # an exception is raised, that means the connection to the client is broken

  23:           sessions.delete(s)

  24:         end

  25:       end

  26:     end

  27:   end

  28: end

Here is the pastie.

Save this file as chat_server.rb

› Continue reading

Using Silverlight with Ruby on Rails

In this post I will be showing a really simple example of creating a Silverlight frontend for a Rails backend. This is what I think will be a three part series comparing Silverlight with Flex.

The steps will be:

1. Creating a Rails application.
2. Creating a frontend for it in silverlight.
3. Creating a frontend for it in Flex.
4. Comparing the approaches taken in both the frontends.

I will try to keep changes in the backend Rails application to a minimum.

› Continue reading