Network Programming with Perl

The Chat Server

The chat server is more complicated than the chat client because it must keep track of each user that logs in and each user's changing channel membership. When a user enters or leaves a channel, the server must transmit a notification to that effect to every remaining member of the channel. Likewise, when a user sends a public message while enrolled in a channel, that message must be duplicated and sent to each member of the channel in turn.

To simplify user management, we create two utility classes, ChatObjects::User and ChatObjects::Channel. A new ChatObjects::User object is created each time a user logs in to the system and destroyed when the user logs out. The class remembers the address and port number of the client's socket ...