Even the most simple chat user interfaces bely a world of architectural complexity. Features like authentication, user presence, chat rooms, user counts, message encryption, and countless others represent a significant undertaking. However, with the right tools, building an enterprise-scale chat application is not only possible, it can be done relatively quickly.
This post is a tutorial for building a basic chat application using the open source Swim platform. The app we’ll be referencing was built by Scott Clarke, a UI developer at Swim, and the source code is available on GitHub here. Because this chat application is intended to demonstrate Swim development patterns, as opposed to being a usable product, we have not included features like authentication or compressive user state tracking. While we do include user presence in the chat app, we took the simplest approach possible and just display a user’s local IP address. This app may be simple, but the same patterns we demonstrate here can be used to build a massively scalable version, and can easily be integrated with authentication services or other third-party software.