What does it take to implement a chat system in Python?

Question

I wanted to do a little project for learning Python. I thought a chat system will be good as it isn't something that I have ever done.

I wanted to know what will I need? I think that would require me these

1 learn network/socket programming
2 find a free server to host my chat server
3 GUI development for clients

-I wanted to know whether these are all that I would need or are there more things?
-Will I need to learn a web framework like Django?
-Will I need to learn something for database management like sql for handling people's account names and password?

Is google appengine good for hosting the website or should I look up at django hosting websites?

Answer 1

This is a "been there, done that" kind of project. You could learn more from reading somebody else is code. What hasn't been done, and this would be very cool, is a chat program that works peer-to-peer with no central server. To do this, you would probably need to know about distributed hash tables and methods of piercing address translation firewalls (think UDP).

First however, I would suggest taking a look at https://jitsi.org/ and see how they do things. You can learn a lot from these people.