HN Explorer

14 comments

[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 41.2 ms ] thread
sim0n
My friend, Greg and I wanted to try out node.js to see how we liked the language (we're looking in to using it on http://interstateapp.com in the near future) and so we decided to do the normal thing and build a multi-channel web chat app.

So far we've spent about 1 day developing it and it seems to be working pretty well. Feel free to try it out by visiting the main prompt channel here: http://prompt.im/prompt.

For those interested, the chat completely uses node.js (with expressjs and nowjs) for the server-side code and we use MongoDB to archive all sent messages.

Any comments would be appreciated :)

LiamSymonds
This is brilliant, you get to meet a multitude of people who are awsome.

The UI is nice, simple and achieves the idea!

Brilliant :)

erik_p
I like the hover over a message for timestamp.
armsteady
Love the site. I had some thoughts about creating something like this. Love the UI too.

Very simple but still elegant and beautiful.

Nice work!

Tycho
1 day, huh?

Node.js is looking like a cotdamn CV goldmine. Bear in mind that most industry people have never even heard of it (never mind most HR people!), and the stuff it lets you do is pretty appealing. And would take a lot of work in other frameworks.

I need to cook up a few of these for myself. Not sure if they'll come out as nice as this though.

getsat
You could do the same with Erlang or Ruby + eventmachine or Python + Twisted, but Node.js is the current hotness.
sim0n
Node.js was great for this because of the nowjs library which let us use practically the same codebase on both the client and the server side of things which really sped up development ;-)
getsat
Whatever gets you to MVP fastest is the best in my book. :)
aurora72
No one's talked about its twitter/fb limitation. Are we born with twitter & fb?
sim0n
It helps fight spam and makes impersonation more cumbersome for trolls.
NewHighScore
I would use this if it didn't have the twitter/fb limitation. I hate being forced to have twitter and facebook to get into other websites. The UI looks excellent though, good work!
ntulip
it is simple, looks and behaves nicely. Good job. Any ideas on commercial aspects of it?