Here is a project I wrote last semester for a client/server systems class. Basically the professor assigned us a table from the Northwind Database. Our first assignment was to take that table, export it to a text file, then create a program to parse that text file and create a random access binary file. We were then to create a GUI that will read, write, and modify records from that binary file. I decided to write my project assignments in Python since that is my programming language of choice.

We spent half the semester working on this part of the project instead of learning anything related to client/server systems. Creating the GUI was extremely easy using Qt3 Designer and pyuic, so most of my work went into the reading and writing of the binary file.

Finally about 3/4 of the way though the semester we were assigned to modify our program to read, write, and modify the binary file over the network. The server contained the binary file, and the client connected to the server to get information from the binary file. This part of the program was actually fun to implement.

Our very last assignment was to merge our client and server with another students. I partnered with Eric Gaumer since he was also working in python. The following code is the result of our work. We took my GUI added the features his client needed and then added his server code to mine.

Simply start the server, then when you start the client enter the ip address where the server is located.

Code:

http://www.mattweber.org/files/nwdb.tar.gz

Note: PyQT and PyKDE are required to run this code.