CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javascriptcloudgoogle-drive-api
Giannis
Giannis

Reputation: 5526

Collaborators chat with Google Drive / Realtime API

I am looking to extend a web application using the new real time API in order to support collaboration (javascript). For that purpose I would also like to include a chat which will be available to users collaborating on same document. After extensive search I cannot find parts of the Drive API that can be used for this. Furthermore none of the open-source examples provided by google implement chat functionality.

Is there existing services/code that I can use to intergrade chat into my application or I would need to implement it?

As mentioned before, the chat should be available to those collaborating on same document.

p.s I do not require any special features, just a simple chat as the one found in google docs etc.

Upvotes: 3

Views: 592

Answers (2)

Cheryl Simon
Cheryl Simon

Reputation: 46844

Right now I don't know of any out-of-the-box solution to this problem. Some people have implemented chat in a realtime document by just placing the chat messages in the realtime data model.

This works fine so long as you don't also want to use undo/redo feature. If you are using undo/redo, then people would end up undoing the chat messages.

We are interested in adding some better support for this eventually, but no promises on anything in the short term.

Upvotes: 1

Sébastien Renauld
Sébastien Renauld

Reputation: 19662

You will need to build your own chat system, as Google just killed off XMPP support on the Chat API (which largely kills off the use of the API). The new Hangouts API does not provide access to Chat ( though some additional methods may come in handy: https://developers.google.com/+/hangouts/ for the dev API).

You are therefore left to your own devices. Fear not, however, writing a chat system is pretty easy. I am about to release a (mostly free) service to do so, so if you want to not have to write the code for it, I can keep you posted.

If, however, you'd prefer to build the code for it, you will most likely want to look into either socket.io or postal.js. both provide the same thing: a pub/sub model. From there, you will need to implement a choice of either:

  • Long polling: supported by all browsers but a bit clunky
  • Websockets: not supported by IE8 and below

This will serve as your data transfer.

Two other possible options are paid services: you can retrofit RabbitMQ to do what you want to do (this, however, will seem clunky). You can also retrofit the Meteord daemon, which does what you want natively, but has an outdated JS library.

The keyword of all this is pub/sub, though.

Upvotes: 1

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