Creating a simple chat room

A basic chat room application is one of the most widely used demos. This shows off Socket.IO or even web sockets in a more general sense. The reason for this is that it immediately gives the business case for Socket.IO in a way that is easy to follow and digest.

Building a basic chat room with Socket.IO is neither terribly difficult or complex. This is the sort of application that Socket.IO was designed for.

When we have completed our chat application, it will look something similar to the following screenshot:

Getting ready

For this recipe, we will use jQuery for simple DOM manipulation and Bootstrap for styling purposes. None of these libraries are required to create a chat app with Socket.IO, but they all provide useful utilities that we can easily tap into.

How to do it…

To create a simple chat application with Socket.IO, follow these steps:

1. Create a server.js file. This file will start your server and emit Socket.IO events whenever a new message is posted to the...