# CS 270 Project 5, "A small server"
by Joseph Cecil and Owen McGrath

A small server which responds to various requests, along with a library for
clients and several clients which serve as thin wrappers around these library
calls.


## Files included
  - README
  - Makefile
  - src/
      - sserver.c
      - smallSet.c
      - smallGet.c
      - smallDigest.c
      - smallRun.c
      - smalld.cpp
      - common.c
  - head/
      - sserver.h
      - common.h

## Features & limitations
### sserver interface
Users of the sserver library code are expected to provide their own buffers for
sserver to fill. sserver functions taking a result buffer will attempt to fill
the buffer if they are passed a non-null pointer.

### sserver run requests
A call to `smallRun()` in the sserver library checks that the run request is a
valid command before transmitting it. If it is invalid, it does not contact the
server, instead returning an error code. This means firstly checking that it is
short enough, and secondly, checking that it is one of the three allowed run
requests.

This leads to a limitation in that if new commands were to be added on the
server side, an old client using the `smallRun()` function of sserver would be
unable to use this new command. Similarly, `smallRun()` would have inconsistent
behavior when used to contact older servers with a request they do not
recognize; rather than simply returning -1 it will actually place the request.

However since the server and the client share their validation code,
recompiling should yield a compatible client and server, both of which
recognize the new request type.

### Variable storage
The server treats variable contents as an arbitrary sequence of bytes rather
than as a string. A limitation of the smallSet and smallGet clients is that
they always treat variable contents as strings; this limitation does not affect
either of the sserver library functions `smallSet()` or `smallGet()`.

## Known bugs
None.