At this stage, my application’s foundation is complete. I can continue to improve existing functionality or build new features. Before the application is released to production and made available for everyone to use, Confetti Cuisine asked me to add an interesting feature to engage users. Without hesitation, I tell them that this is a perfect opportunity to build a chat feature within their Node.js application. Because I don’t want to complicate the application too much before deployment, I’ll keep the chat simple.
The chat will allow only users with accounts to communicate with one another. Every time a message is sent, I’ll save the message and associate it with the sender behind the scenes. Also, I’ll take advantage of socket.io to maintain an open connection between connected clients and the server for real-time communication. Through this library’s event-driven tools, I can emit events from the server to individual clients or all clients and from the client to the server. I could also emit events to a select group of clients, but I won’t need to implement that feature for this application.
Later, I’ll connect a chat icon in the navigation bar to animate whenever a chat message is sent. All users see this icon animate whenever a message is emitted. This icon doubles as a link to the chat page. It’s time to put the finishing touches on the Confetti Cuisine application.
33.1. Installing socket.io