Designing a Simple Chat Room using TCP in Java

Learn how to create a basic chat room application in Java using TCP protocol. This guide covers the implementation of a server and multiple clients to facilitate text-based communication in a chat room environment.
---
Disclaimer/Disclosure: Some of the content was synthetically produced using various Generative AI (artificial intelligence) tools; so, there may be inaccuracies or misleading information present in the video. Please consider this before relying on the content to make any decisions or take any actions etc. If you still have any concerns, please feel free to write them in a comment. Thank you.
---
In this guide, we'll walk through the process of creating a simple chat room using the TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) protocol in Java. TCP provides reliable, ordered, and error-checked delivery of data between applications. We'll implement a server that handles connections from multiple clients and facilitates communication among them.

Setting up the Server

First, let's create the server-side of our chat room:

[[See Video to Reveal this Text or Code Snippet]]

Setting up the Client

Next, let's create the client-side of our chat room:

[[See Video to Reveal this Text or Code Snippet]]

Running the Application

To run the chat room application, follow these steps:

Start the server by running java ChatServer.

Start multiple clients by running java ChatClient in separate terminal/command prompt windows.

Enter text in any client window to send messages to the server and other connected clients.

Conclusion

In this guide, we've built a simple chat room application using Java and TCP. The server listens for incoming connections from clients and spawns a new thread to handle each client connection. Clients can connect to the server and send messages, which are then broadcasted to all other connected clients.

This basic implementation can be extended in various ways, such as adding user authentication, implementing private messaging, or supporting multimedia content. Feel free to experiment and enhance the functionality of your chat room application.