Gerardo Marx Chávez-Campos af25b10b04 | 1 year ago | |
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Readme.md | 1 year ago | |
index.html | 2 years ago | |
index.js | 2 years ago | |
package.json | 1 year ago |
In this guide we’ll create a basic chat application. It requires almost no basic prior knowledge of Node.JS or Socket.IO, so it’s ideal for users of all knowledge levels.
Writing a chat application with popular web applications stacks like LAMP (PHP) has normally been very hard. It involves polling the server for changes, keeping track of timestamps, and it’s a lot slower than it should be.
Sockets have traditionally been the solution around which most real-time chat systems are architected, providing a bi-directional communication channel between a client and a server.
This means that the server can push messages to clients. Whenever you write a chat message, the idea is that the server will get it and push it to all other connected clients.
The first goal is to set up a simple HTML webpage that serves out a form and a list of messages. We’re going to use the Node.JS web framework express
to this end. Make sure Node.JS is installed.
First let’s create a package.json
manifest file that describes our project. I recommend you place it in a dedicated empty directory (I’ll call mine chat-example
).
{
"name": "socket-chat-example",
"version": "0.0.1",
"description": "my first socket.io app",
"dependencies": {}
}