Course project for Programming 4

A windows desktop front end for a chat server. Built with dioxus which uses WebView2 for rendering.

Prerequisites

• Maven and JDK 18 or later
• Rust
  • Binaries can be found here
• (optional) cargo-binstall. This allows installing built binaries, which makes setup quicker.
• dioxus-cli version 0.7.2
  • cargo install dioxus-cli (or cargo binstall dioxus-cli)
  • Installation guide here for possible problems
• WebView2. If Edge is installed on windows, this probably is already installed.

Setting up dev server

This'll start up the chat server on port 10000:

git submodule update
cd server
mvn package
java -jar target/ChatServer-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT-jar-with-dependencies.jar chatserver.properties

Full dev setup

cargo install cargo-binstall
cargo binstall dioxus-cli --version 0.7.2
rustup target add wasm32-unknown-unknown

Running the application

Once setup is done, the application can be started in dev mode/demoed by running the following command in the project's directory:

dx run

Note that cargo run will not work as the application doesn't have permissions to load assets from the assets folder.

Common commands

Task	Command
Running dev environment	dx serve
Running linter	cargo clippy
Running dioxus linter	dx check
Bundling the project	dx bundle --desktop

Misc Notes

• Multiple messages can be sent in a single message separated by newline \n?

TODO

• Add dividers for message history view. Related files: src/components/message_history.rs and src/components/routes/home.rs They should display:
  • When date changes
  • When topic changes
• Use onkeydown for login input field as it would make writing experience more smooth. Related file: src/components/input_field.rs.
• Use an embedded font instead of fetching it from Google API. Not sure if its cached or fetced every time the app is opened? Related file: src/main.rs.
• Channels list in AppState (src/main.rs) could use a set implementation instead of Vec.
• Refresh button for channels as they're not always up to date.
  • If some implementation for updating channel information is created, showing channel user count would be possible.