Angular-Flavored Chat

Sample AngularJS + NodeJS/Express application demonstrating the use of Socket.IO. I am using:

• AngularJS
• NodeJS
• Express - NOTE I'm using 3.5
• Socket.IO and Socket.IO Client for web socket support
• Brian Ford's Angular Socket IO client
• Twitter Bootstrap and both the Express and AngularJS Yeoman generators.

This project was a simple test of sockets as a traditional (some might say 'ye olde') chat program. I wanted to write it as angularly as possible (is that really a word?) and use the traditional Grunt-based workflow of Yeoman where possible.

At some point I need to take a day and convert this over to a more comprehensive script with gulp. Ah, todo todo...

I am not using Node at this point for anything more than a chat websocket server, however now you're nicely set up for an /api (see the /route directory and js file for a stupid JSON example).

Runtime instructions

I have the root app.js node script pointing to serve / as the content in /angular-frontend/app/ - you can construct and build and minify with grunt --force in the angular-frontend directory. This will set the content in /public to the minified version of the application and you can serve that by editing app.js.

To launch the app and run in development mode:

node app.js

Once you're ready to test a final build (minified, two javascript files), do this:

1. Edit the app.js file and swap the commented and uncommented lines that serve the static content.

2. Run the build:

cd angular-frontend
grunt --force
cd ..
node app.js

3. Browse to http://localhost:3000 and you should see the chat client using minified scripts.