Node Chat Demo

A hastily-assembled demo of a chat application built using Node, CoffeeScript and Backbone.

I used this demo to conclude my Bits & Bytes talk at the University of Minnesota Morris on October 30, 2013.

Keep in mind that although I aimed for relatively clean code, this application was thrown together the day before the talk. As such, the code undoubtedly contains bugs, unhandled errors, and bad design decisions.

How to Run

To run this demo, you will first need to install IcedCoffeeScript globally with npm: npm install -g iced-coffee-script.

Then simply run iced server.coffee.

Directory Structure

• client/ - My own client-side code
  • css/ - My LESS CSS code
  • js/ - Third-party client-side libraries
• node_modules/ - Third-party server-side libraries
• server/ - My own server-side code
• shared/ - My own code shared between client and server. Mostly just utilities
• templates/ - HTML templates used client-side. Probably could be moved into client/

What Libraries Are Used?

Here's a list of the libraries and modules included.

Server Only

• express - Web server framework
• async - Asynchronous control flow
• Less CSS - Dynamic stylesheets

Client Only

• jQuery - DOM manipulation, utilities
• Backbone - MVC, client-server sync, HTML5 pushState routing

Shared

• IcedCoffeeScript - CoffeeScript with built-in async control flow constructs
• UnderscoreJS - Utilities
• swig - Templating engine
• Socket.IO - WebSockets library with graceful degradation