Opa: Up and Running

Chapter 6. The Web Chat App

The simplest example of a real-time web app is a web chat, similar to Facebook chat. As real-time is a feature of our micro-blogging app, we detail here what has become the de facto example of Opa programming.

Our goal here is to build the application shown in Figure 6-1: a single chat room. Users connect to chat using regular web browsers, join the room immediately, and can start discussing in real time. For the sake of simplicity, we will choose names of users randomly. We will discuss in Chapter 8 how to add proper user management.

Note

In the web world, real time refers to the ability of a web page to update itself automatically when some data changes. Often in Web 2.0 apps, this is linked to displaying user interactions in real time; that is, updating the user interface of one user when another user does something.

Figure 6-1. Our chat goal

Starting a New Project

To start the new chat application, simply write:

Tokyo:~ henri$ opa create chat

This will create a chat directory and generate a scaffolding for a new Opa app, with the following content:

+- chat
| +- Makefile
| +- Makefile.common
| +- opa.conf
| +- resources
| | +- css
| | | +- style.css
| +- src
| | +- model.opa
| | +- view.opa
| | +- controller.opa

The project includes:

• A Makefile file for the project (which can be customized)
• A generic Makefile.common file (which usually won’t be modified)
• A configuration ...