A real-time chat application using express, socket.io, redis, and etc.

• https://youtu.be/WnVaSpbJjmY

This tutorial is for mac environment. The process in Windows environment should be similar.

- install redis database in your computer.

- open a terminal and run redis server in your computer.
$ redis-server

- open another terminal and enter the directory of this chat application.
$ cd jiakaiz_FSE_chatroom

- install dependencies for this application.(if there are no required dependencies)
$ npm install

- run node server.
$ node index.js

- open your several browsers to 'http://localhost:8080' as clients.

- enjoy this fantastic real-time chatting experience.

• A user can join a chat room with a unique username. if the username is illegal, there will be an alert information.

• Users can post chat messages to the chat room. Each message is displayed with username, timestamp, text body and a unique color.

• Users can see other users’ chat messages in real time.

• Users can receive the information of whoever is in this chat room in real time.

• A notification is sent to all other users to inform that whether a user is typing or not.

• A notification is sent to all users when a user joins or leaves the chatroom.

• All the chat messages are stored on the server in a redis database and re-loaded when a user re-enters the chat room. So users are able to see historical chat messages.

• Client side: the standard “web stack”: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Jquery.

• Server side: Node.js with express.js and socket.io.

• Database: redis database.