Prototype Aether is a General Purpose Peer to Peer communication protocol. It allows developers to develop P2P applications using an easy to use library.
The Rust library aether_lib contains the actual implementation of the protocol.
It can be used directly as a Rust library to develop applications. However, the
Aether Service which is currently
under development is recommended way to interact with Aether.
The documentation for Aether Lib can be found here
Add aether_lib to your project in Cargo.toml as
toml
[dependencies]
aether_lib = { git = "https://github.com/Prototype-Aether/Aether-Lib.git" }
The following examples show how to use aether_lib for P2P communications.
A tracker server is required for the network to function. The tracker server helps in peer discovery and provides public identities of the peers for UDP Holepunching (peer introduction).
In order to use P2P communication, you need to initialize an Aether instance. This
can be done as follows -
```rust use std::net::{IpAddr, Ipv4Addr, SocketAddr}; use aether_lib::peer::Aether;
// The socker address of a tracker server to be used let tracker_addr = SocketAddr::new(IpAddr::V4(Ipv4Addr::new(1, 2, 3, 4)), 8982);
// Initalize the link with a given tracker address let aether = Aether::new(tracker_addr);
// Start the link aether.start(); ```
To start a P2P link to another peer, use the function connect() in Aether.
rust
let peer_uid = String::from("<peer-uid-here>");
aether.connect(&peer_uid);
All communications happen in form of bytes, so you can send Vec<u8>. For example,
strings can be converted to bytes using string.into_bytes() (this converts to UTF-8
encoding) and from UTF-8 encoded bytes using let string = String::from_utf8(bytes).
In order to send bytes to a user peer_uid you can use send_to()
rust
let message = String::from("Hello");
let bytes = message.into_bytes();
aether.send_to(&peer_uid, bytes).unwrap();
In order to receive bytes from a user peer_uid you can use recv_from()
rust
let bytes = aether.recv_from(&peer_uid).unwrap();
let message = String::from_utf8(bytes).unwrap();