Social Network Simulator

This repository contains the foundational C++ core logic for a social network simulator. It's built to efficiently manage users, connections, and perform graph analysis.

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Features

The C++ core logic provides the following functionalities:

• User Management:
  • Add new users with unique IDs, usernames, names, ages, and interests.
  • Retrieve user profiles by ID.
  • List all users in the network.
• Connection Management:
  • Establish and remove bidirectional friendships between users.
  • List friends of a specific user.
• Network Analysis (Graph Algorithms):
  • Find the shortest path (degrees of separation) between any two users using Breadth-First Search (BFS).
  • Identify common friends between any two users.
• Network Data Retrieval:
  • Efficiently retrieve all users and all connections in formats suitable for later visualization.
• Network Statistics:
  • Calculate overall network statistics like total users, total connections, and average friends per user.

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Core Technologies

• Language: C++
• Core Data Structures: std::map, std::vector, std::set, std::queue

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Next Steps

This repository currently houses the robust C++ backend logic. The next major phase is to build a frontend to provide a graphical user interface (GUI) for interacting with this social network.

I am considering two primary approaches for the frontend:

1. C++ Web Server + JavaScript Frontend: This would involve adapting the main.cpp to run a C++ web server (using a library like Crow or a custom Winsock implementation) that exposes RESTful API endpoints. A separate web-based frontend (using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript frameworks like React or Vue, possibly D3.js for visualization) would then consume these APIs.
2. C++ Windows Desktop Application: This involves building a native Windows application using a UI framework (such as Dear ImGui, MFC, or Qt) that directly links to and utilizes the SocialNetwork C++ classes. This would result in a standalone .exe file.

The choice of frontend will dictate further development.

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Contributing

Feel free to open issues or submit pull requests if you would like to add the frontend/application or improvements for the backend logic.