Quilt

Description

Quilt is a chat system designed for mesh networks. It was written in python and uses zeromq as a way to pass data between nodes. Each node connects to other nodes and allows a user to chat. The end goal is to have a resilient chat network that auto discovers nodes on a mesh network.

Protocol

The Quilt protocol is a simple text based protocol over zeromq. zeromq can send multi-part messages and quilt takes advantage of that as a separate between different sections of a message. Current protocol:

join -- [routing, destination, "join," user, channel]
part -- [routing, destination, "part", user, channel]
message -- [routing, destination, "message", user, channel, message]
ping [routing, destination, "ping", server]
pong [routing, destination, "pong", server]
server_connect [routing, destination, "server_connect", our_address, our_port]

Project Setup

The project has 2 main folders and several other sub folders.

tests
- Unit tests for Quilt are located here

quilt
- This folder holds the source code for quilt it has 1 sub folder
- __init__.py stores the core quilt code for threading and running the server
- protocol.py holds the protocol implementation
- models
  - Models holds classes for storing data in a way that will be accessible beyond the QuiltProtocol object in protocol.py

Dependencies

Core

pyzmq-static

Unit tests

nose

TODO

The current todo list is as follows:

Rewrite the routing implementation to be much smarter
Hook the avahi node discovery code into the core system
Improved UI
rewrite documentation

Core contributors

Links

Quilt Github