I’ve been playing around with Node.js recently and taking some of the neat online lessons available through Nodeschool. One of the lessons involved streaming realtime data between the client and server using Socket.io.
This sounded insanely powerful and fun, so I took a break from the rest of the lessons and started playing around with Socket.io. They have a tutorial that explains how to build a simple, realtime chat application using its library in about 20 minutes.
I’ve uploaded the results of this little project to Github and you can view it right here. This little web app is more or less a result of tutorial and I’ve added some additional stuff as I played around with it:
- Usernames!
- Number of active users!
- Display a list of all connected users!
- Check for identical usernames and prompt for different name
- Timestamps on messages!
- Sanitizing user input!
- Properly autolink URLs!
- Detect if a link to an image is pasted in and expand!
- Display welcome message on connect
All in all, it’s been a really fun learning process and has given me some ideas on how to use Node.js for future realtime applications.
Note: You can see this in action on Heroku. You’ll probably be the only one only, but hey! https://davechat.herokuapp.com/