Real-Time Chat App with HTML5 WebSockets by Josh Teng
Channel: GeekcampSG
Date: 2014-01-13

Real-time apps are increasingly important nowadays. It's part of having great UX for the modern age. An understanding of WebSockets will allow you to build real-time goodies like twitter feeds, facebook timeline, real time chat, games etc.

We'll build a browser based chat app using WebSockets. This is the new HTML5 standard of handling 2 way communication between client and server or server sent events. Prior to WebSockets, technologies such as comet/ajax and flash has been used to handle server sent events or push technology. WebSockets are great for real-time apps such as chat, games, 'timelines', 'feeds', etc.. It's more efficient and does not hammer your server like how previous technologies would.

This will be a practical presentation to get you started using websockets in 30 minutes. I'll be showing you how to do this with a little bit of ruby, javascript, html, css. I'll be using Sinatra to build this.

Josh Teng
@joshzteng
http://joshteng.com/