I have written a basic chat application using node.js, what do you guys think?

http://sekonode.herokuapp.com/

by serkanyersen • 15 years ago

15 26 15 years ago

sekonode.herokuapp.com

bhaaai• 15 years ago

I can't enter the chat. Save Name button does nothing! I'm on firefox 3.6.17.

serkanyersen11• 15 years ago

I haven't made any crossbrowser test. It may only work on latest browsers. Sorry about that

akkishore• 15 years ago

Isn't this similar to http://chat.nodejs.org/?

serkanyersen11• 15 years ago

Probably. I just wrote it to learn web sockets and node.js All websocket examples was too complex to dig in so I made a simple one.

serkanyersen11• 15 years ago

I see people are complaing about the XHR requests. That's not my fault. I'm using heroku for hosting and it does not support websockets, so I have to force socket.io to use ajax long polling. That's actually heroku's solution.

But if you run it on your server or Cloud9 ide it will work just fine.

cjfont• 15 years ago

It seems that most of the XHR requests are due to the "is writing" notifications, you may try throttling just those to reduce the number of requests.

Also, with so many users chatting the screen scrolls too fast so I would reduce the vertical spacing a bit.

serkanyersen11• 15 years ago

Well I didn't think there would be so many people on it :) But it was so much fun until it failed :) I will probably fix those issues but it was just a demo to see node.js and socket.io

LeafStorm• 15 years ago

It seems that when the client loses the connection, it doesn't attempt to reconnect.

serkanyersen11• 15 years ago

Yep, I just noticed that.

limanoit• 15 years ago

ya..save name button does not do anything and it is almost similar to the chat demo of node.js

chjj• 15 years ago

I think writing a chat app is the rite of passage for node developers at this point.

adrianpike• 15 years ago

It's node's hello world. :)

serkanyersen11• 15 years ago

Exactly :)

tikhonj• 15 years ago

Yeah, it's the first thing I did too. It's the most node and ajax/comet/websocket learning per line of code that actually outputs something useful.

spp3• 15 years ago

I've written a (very) basic mud server in node.js (in like 8 hours). Maybe you'll be interested: https://github.com/farevalod/nodemud (I'd appreciate some comments on it too!)

serkanyersen11• 15 years ago

It would be great to see a working demo.

spp3• 15 years ago

It's working at 4ws.cl:8800

spp3• 15 years ago

pd: you should telnet/nc to 4ws.cl 8800 to connect.

serkanyersen11• 15 years ago

Haha. Either heroku or Node.js couldn't handle the Hacker News traffic. If you would like to see the code

https://github.com/serkanyersen/Basic-Chat

serkanyersen11• 15 years ago

ok it's back now.

bpfh• 15 years ago

Seems fairly usable atm. A few observations: there is an XSS vulnerability as you probably learned by now. Also, there was a moment when someone was submitting content and it appeared under my nick "bpfh".

Other than that, kudos for a simple well-functioning chat.

serkanyersen11• 15 years ago

Thanks. Those two security issues are fixed now. It was nice chatting with you :)

JamesBlair• 15 years ago

> > Also, there was a moment when someone was submitting content and it appeared under my nick "bpfh".

> Thanks. Those two security issues are fixed now.

You fixed one way of nickname duplication, but so long as you allow arbitrary utf-8 strings, there are all sorts of non-printing characters to use. You should really get a list of everything to filter. I don't have any experience with node.js, so I don't know if anyone has written a library that does it.

akivabamberger• 15 years ago

ugh stop copying the node.js chat code and acting like it's something brand new. this is publicly available on rydahl's github.

serkanyersen11• 15 years ago

I didn't say it's brand new. Actually this is basically a hello world aplication for node.js

I liked the output and wanted to know what people would think about it.

BTW, I didn't copy anything, I watched the video and saw ryan doing TCP chat example and I thought I can do it for web and that would be great to learn node.js and socket.io

jiyinyiyong• 15 years ago

UI is great. I wrote one serveral days ago, aiming to offer real time chat featute(http:zhonglichat.cnodejs.net), new I see how ugly that is.. Nodejs moke chating really fun.

I have written a basic chat application using node.js, what do you guys think?

Related Stories