Python Network Programming

How to do it...

We need to write an efficient chat server that can handle several hundred or a large number of client connections. We will use the select() method from the select module that will enable our chat server and client to do any task without blocking a send or receive a call all the time.

Let us design this recipe such that a single script can launch both client and server with an additional --name argument. Only if --name=server is passed from the command line, the script will launch the chat server. Any other value passed to the --name argument, for example, client1, client2, will launch a chat client. Let's specify our chat server port number from the command line using the --port argument. For a larger application, it may be ...