When building a collaborative application, chat will usually worm its way in somewhere. Allowing users to chat in text while they collaborate can make the experience more engaging, or simply ease communication between peers. Simple chat examples can be functional and easy to build, but they're usually not structured for production-level applications. You will need to consider:
- How to store & retrieve messages
- Authentication, authorization, and roles for users
- How to handle complex messages like styling and commands
- User information and presence data, who is online?
- How the application will scale as the userbase grows
- Third party integrations, eg profanity filtering, moderation, link checking.
When you're building a chat app, you're not necessarily interested in making different kinds of guarantees about connectivity or message delivery, and you may not want to delve into different levels of communication protocols or designing and managing a database.
You just need to make a chat app.
Here at Ably, we're writing an open-source demo chat app with a complete feature set. (We've called it the fully featured scalable chat app (or FFS for short). It's currently in progress, and as we go, we're putting the code in Github and writing a series of posts about it. Anyone can use it for chat integration in their apps.
We'll be using Ably in combination with other services to store, manipulate and share data (here's a diagram of the stack):
- Web Application that is hosted in Azure Static Web Apps (React for first round, but potentially other frameworks and or vanilla JS version to come)
- "BFF" (backend for frontend) API built to run in Azure Functions (Node.js)
- CosmosDB database to store metadata (user accounts, chat channel metadata)
- Ably Realtime account to send and receive chat messages
- Archive API to receive events from Ably Reactor and maintain a chat history
- Storage bucket to store the Chat Archive.
However, this is just our current plan. We want our work to be as beneficial as possible for anyone making a chat app. If you have any features of chat applications you'd like us to investigate, requests for us to look at different technologies, or simply want to let us know what you think, please let us know!