Development of a Text-Based Interactive Communication System for NIIT

Abstract

As more and more critical services are provided over the LAN, the need for an effective and efficient communication system is also increasing. The TICS (Text-based Interactive Communication System) is intended to provide the supreme communication environment that will facilitate not only students but also faculty members of the NUST Institute of Information Technology. The traditional ways of communication with in the campus have failed to provide any common community forum for students and faculty members. TICS provides the community chat rooms both for students and faculty members. It is basically a LAN communication system, so you don’t need to connect to the internet for chatting using this software. The edifice of the system is laid upon the java networking concepts of threading, UDP datagram sockets and TCP sockets. The implementation of the software in java makes its significance even more eminent as one of Java's great strengths is painless networking and it is platform independent so you can run TICS on any environment e.g. Solaris, UNIX, and LINUX etc. As much as possible, the underlying details of networking have been abstracted away. In addition, Java's built-in multithreading is exceptionally handy when dealing with another networking issue: handling multiple connections at once. Moreover, TICS is a multi-tier system consisting of a multi-threaded authentication server application, a database application, a multi-threaded chat server application and a multi-threaded client application that performs the file transfer (send and receive) and messages (send and receive) functionalities in parallel.