I'm currently working on trying to create a very basic bare bones instant messenger with Java.
I'm at a bit of a loss where to begin, was wondering if anyone here could reccommend a starting point? What I should read? What would be the easiest way for a beginner/intermediate programmer to try and achieve this?
Currently, I'll I'd want it to be able to do is to send text to one machine to another. I am so far unfamiliar with anything network related in java. Would I use a server or just direct connect between two machines?
Any pointers/direction or advice anyone has in this matter would be very helpful!
Well, I am focusing the second question of yours.
If you're building this program for your local area network and if you're intended to use socket programming, you need to find the exact ip address of the machine. If you don't know the ip address ( I mean if you don't want the program to know ip address before you run it ) ,then you can ping local ip addresses until you find some peers.
Some of the p2p applications use servers as the ip matchers. This means that the servers have ip address tables which make all of the users send/receive data by using these servers. But if you just started on networking with this project, I think don't use server.
Lastly, you can take a look at a project of my own. It's a simple parallel document preparation program with a chat module inside it. It's developed in C#. It needs wireless ad hoc network to run. Link : http://code.google.com/p/parallel-docs/