Let's chat over UDP

Once upon a time, @edwardloveall, being of a curious bent, decided to investigate UDP messaging for a game. He shared this ambition with me and we discovered Glenn Fiedler's excellent Networking for Game Programmers article series.

I recommend Glenn's articles - he has a clear explanation of the differences between TCP and UDP, and why TCP isn't appropriate for high-performance game programming.

OK, sure, but this isn't a game?

Yeah, fair question. We decided to implement person-to-person chat first, which turned out to be more complicated than expected. But we ended up with chat.rb, which has detailed (OSX-specific) instructions on how to find the appropriate IP address and ports for setting up a computer-to-computer connection.

Questions? Advice?

I'd describe my adventures in networking as "bumbling", so any advice is appreciated. Is there a classic text? Or a good blog post? Send it to @gabebw.