A fully decentralized chat system designed for resilience, scalability, and eventual consistency. It combines modern distributed systems concepts such as causal consistency via vector clocks, operation-based CRDTs for conflict-free state synchronization, consistent hashing to balance load across distributed nodes, and multiple communication paradigms including both direct and aggregated messaging.
Note
Each component operates independently and discovers others using a shared configuration file (config/config.json), for optimal stability and performance, run multiple instances of each component as outlined below.
- Rebar3
- Erlang/OTP 27
- Java 21 or higher
- Maven (version 3.8+ recommended)
mvn clean compileIf you're using Sway as your window manager, simply run ./present main to launch all services at once. Otherwise, you'll need to start each component individually as demonstrated below.
./present dht
The binding addresses are automatically assigned, so they are not specified in the configuration file.
./present sa <saID>
Replace <saID> with the Aggregation Server ID (e.g., sa1).
./present sc <scID>
Replace <scID> with the Chat Server ID (e.g., sc1).
./present client <cliID>
Replace <cliID> with the Client ID (e.g., cli1).
To ensure proper system operation and avoid aggregation issues, we recommend the following setup:
- 3 DHT Nodes
- 3 Aggregation Servers
- 3 Chat Servers (one per Aggregation Server)
- 2 Clients