CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-railsrubyruby-on-rails-4faye
Talespin_Kit
Talespin_Kit

Reputation: 21887

ruby on rails chat application over port 80 which is hosting site agnostic(no flash and websockets)

Wanted to build a chat like application(i.e bidirectional message passing to multiple connected clients). Looked at the Faye gem but it opens a new port apart from port 80.

The big problem is that if the client is behind firewall all access to other ports except 80 are restricted and not all the hosting sites provide the support.

The ActionController::Live component does not have any mechanism to register the clients so that the message can not be passed to the registered clients on a specific event occurance.

Looking for a solution where the alive clients are stored in a collection(array or somthing like that) and when any of the alive client sends a message then the collection can be iterated and the messages can be written on it. All of these must happen only through port 80.

Upvotes: 3

Views: 316

Answers (2)

Torsten Robitzki
Torsten Robitzki

Reputation: 2555

Maybe you want to use my open source comet web server (https://github.com/TorstenRobitzki/Sioux). There is a ruby web chat example. I use this to implement an interactive role playing map with rails (http://dungeonpilot.com).

Upvotes: 0

Richard Peck
Richard Peck

Reputation: 76784

Good question - having implemented something similar, let me explain how it works:

Connections

A "live" web application is not really "live" at all - it's just got a persistent request; meaning it still works exactly the same as a "normal" Rails app, except clients don't close the connection (hence why you're interested in opening another port)

The way you handle the request is where the magic happens. This is as much to do with the client-side, as it is with Rails (server-side)

Clients

When you connect to a "chat" application, your browser is opening a live connection with the server. This will typically be done with either server sent events (Ajax long polling), or web sockets

The way this works is to open the connection using the normal Rails ActionDispatch middleware, and then allow you to connect

If you've played with ActionController::Live functionality, you'll find that it's not a typical controller-action. It's actually a separate technology (like resque or Redis) which you call from another controller action. This gives room to do cool things with

Server

The way you'd handle something like this is to separate the "live" functionality and the "normal" Rails app. It's one of the current down-falls of Rails - in that it's probably better to implement something like nodeJS with socket.io to handle the live data (with an endpoint like chat.yourapp.com), whilst using Rails to handle authentication & authorization

From a server perspective, its job is to handle incoming & outgoing requests -- not to handle persistent connections. So I guess you may want to look at ways you could "outsource" the websocket connectivity. Admittedly, my experience is slightly thin in this area, so you may do well searching the net

Solutions

We've had a lot of success using a third-party system called Pusher

This is a web socket system which allows you to open a persistent connection as a client, and integrates with Rails in a similar way to Redis (you can push to it)

This means you can host the "chat" application with Rails (http://yourapp.com/chat), send the messages to your Rails app (http://yourapp.com/chat/send), and handle the incoming chats from pusher (or similar)

Upvotes: 1

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