Build Advanced Messaging Proof Of Concept

[jjeffryes]

Description

Build a Proof Of Concept (POC) to demonstrate our messaging implementation plan (see issue #2) will work. This should demonstrate the ability to store messages for multiple peerIDs and efficiently retrieve them.

Requirements

Client POC

• It should have a text box to input text for chat messages.
• The peerID for the recipient of the chat messages can be hard coded, or have an input field.
• It should have a send live button.
  • Pressing the button would send an offline formatted message to a node, which would attempt to push it to the destination node. If the destination node was unreachable, it would be sent as an offline message.
• Received messages from the other node should be displayed on the page. It's sufficient to just show the last received message.
• The POC should demonstrate it can receive live and offline messages. It might be better to have a separate display area for received offline messages?

Server POC

This can be a branch of the existing node.

Sending Messages

• It should be able to receive messages from the browser page.
• The messages should be sent to the recipient node using the offline wrapper format.
• If the message is not received, the message should instead be stored and a pointer added to the DHT.
  • How does the server know the message was not received? It seems like this requires an ACK.
• Do we need to do something with the sending IP? Will the recipient see the messaging server's IP as the IP to respond to?

Receiving Messages

• It should be able to find offline messages on the DHT intended for the browser page and store them in a database for later retrieval.
• It should be able to store offline messages for multiple peerIDs. Three or so is enough for a POC.
• The peerIDs to track should be established by a browser client sending a message to it to be sent to another node and initiating a relationship with the messaging server.
  • We can assume no one would send a message to a web buying node before it has sent a message to anyone else, since the purpose of those nodes is to only buy things.
• When a web buying client requests messages, the server should send the requested unsent messages for that peerID.