'DEVELOPMENT INFO

Title:	MyChat
Author Name:	Ray Barham
Creation Date:	5/29/2007
Developed on:	Windows XP
Developed With:	Java(TM) SE Development Kit 6 & JCreator 4.00.028

DESCRIPTION

Hello, my name is Ray Barham and this is a peer-to-peer chat program that I created to gain some more experience with writing Java networking and multithreading programs.  It allows people to chat together without the need for a server.  This, of course, has its drawbacks but this program was never meant to be used by a large user base.

This program should only be used in a private LAN environment.  The messages sent are NOT encrypted so there is a possibility for snooping.

In developing this program I created a few nifty little classes that could help me out later.  One was my own personal dialog class, MyDialog.  These dialogs are just about the same as JOptionPane except for different icons and the ability to specify the modality as modeless.  Thanks, by the way, to sniffels at http://sniffels.deviantart.com/ for the awesome icons.  I also created a pretty cool set of networking classes that use event handling to notify and pass along a connection.  I decided not to include because they were found to not really be necessary.  Still pretty cool, though.

The settings file is “settings.dat” and the recipient list file is “list.csv”.  Both can be easily modified manually.  An example of a setting in the settings file is “username=Jan Doe”.  This setting sets the username of the current user of the chat program to “Jan Doe”.  The program will automatically generate a settings file if one is not found.  The recipient list file is a comma separated value (or csv) file.  The format of the csv file is “recipient name,computer name” where each line is a new recipient.  If the computer name has spaces then they will be trimmed off.  Well, that seems to be it with the description.  I hope you enjoy using it because I put a lot of hard work into it.

COMPILE AND RUN

Before compiling or running, ensure that the java/bin directory is in you systems PATH, unless you want to do things the long way. :-).  See http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/essential/environment/paths.html for information on how to do this.

To compile into bytecode:

Browse to the directory of the source code and type…
javac MyChat.java

To run the bytecode:

	Browse to the directory where the bytecode is and type…
java MyChat

To run the jar file (Note: To run the jar file download, you will need Java 6.):

	Browse to the directory where the .jar file is located and type or double click…
java –jar MyChat.jar

That should be about it.  If you have any questions, comments, or problems, or anything else you what to mention you can contact me at rbarham1980@cox.net.