Runtime Interpreter

By passing a file to cicada.py, you can execute a series of commands that interact with the Cicada API.

Each line is executed in order, and has a set of required parameters. Comment lines start with a # and are ignored.

• SEND [host] [port] [data...] Sends a message to a particular address. [port] must be convertible to an integer.
• RECV [count] Waits for a message to be received from anyone. The [count] parameter is optional, and indicates the number of messages to wait for.
• BCAST [data...] Sends the specified data to the entire swarm.
• OPT key1=value key2=value [key=value...] Processes and sets the configurable options. All subsequent lines will have these options applied to them.
• WAIT [time (s)] Waits for an incoming connection for a certain amount of time. If set to -1, waits indefinitely. This is useful for the first peer in a swarm.

Configurable Options

Parameter	Type	Description
duplicates	int	Configures the number of extra paths to take for all of the SEND calls.

Example Runtimes

You usually will want a single “server” runtime that starts the swarm; it waits for the other peers to join. This can look something like this:

WAIT -1
OPT duplicates=3
BCAST Hey everyone, I'm the original peer.
SEND localhost 49611 Hey there, specific client @ localhost:49611, it's me.
RECV 2

You would run this like so:

./cicada.py --interface localhost -p 49610 --no-port-mapping first.conf

Similarly, you’d want a “join immediately” peers that look something like this:

RECV 1
BCAST Hey everyone, I'm a new peer!
RECV 1
SEND localhost 49610 Hey there, localhost:49610; it's me.

This would be run like so:

./cicada.py --interface localhost -p 49611 --no-port-mapping --join localhost:49611 others.conf