AcaniChat - HTML5 WebSockets & Node.js chat on the iPhone
An open-source version of iPhone's native Messages app
Features
Currently, AcaniChat features message persistence with Core Data and a chat view that allows you to send chat bubbles to yourself. Next, we'll implement sending messages over the network through the Acani chat server.
-
ConversationsViewController: List of conversations (
UITableViewController
)- Coming soon...
-
ChatViewController: One-on-one Chat (
UIViewController
)- chatContent (
UITableView
)- Identical UI (colors, layout, and font size) to iPhone's Messages app
- Conditional timestamps (only shown every so often)
- Delete edit-mode: Delete one message at a time or clear all at once
- Trims whitespace on ends of messages; prevents sending blank messages
- chatInput (
UITextView
)sendButton.enabled = [chatInput isEmpty] ? NO : YES
- Collapses & expands (between one & four lines) with content
- becomes scrollable after content exceeds four lines
- chatContent (
iOS Technologies
-
UIKit
UINavigationController
- Custom
UITableViewCell
s - Core Data
-
Coming Soon
- ZTWebSocket & AsyncSocket
Design Practices
AcaniChat is simple yet modular, implementation-agnostic, and extensible.
- Create views programmatically
Authentication: Facebook Connect & NSURLConnection
AcaniChat will implement authentication through various third-party accounts, such as Facebook, Twitter, GitHub, etc.
Connection: HTML5 WebSockets - ZTWebSocket & AsyncSocket
AcaniChat will soon be able to connect to web servers that support HTML5 WebSockets. It will use ZTWebSocket, built on top of AsyncSocket, to support a WebSockets connection.
Server: HTML5 WebSockets - Node.js & Redis
Using [Node.js][] & [node-websocket-server][], we built a chat server called [acani-chat-server][] (coming soon) that supports HTML5 WebSockets connections.
Chat: Redis PUB/SUB
The Acani chat server uses [Redis][] & the [Redis PUB/SUB functions][] to implement chat. Each user subscribes to the channel named after her username.
Contributors
- Matt Di Pasquale
- Peng Wan
- Abhinav Sharma
- Nick LeMay
- Eugene Bae