So, working on a little Node.js project...anyone have any experiences to share?

[Rob Dunn]

I'm essentially putting together a poor-man chat service. Mostly for use in Spiceworks so techs can chat back and forth with each other...

Now, I'm using some demos that I found online and I have to say, Node.js is pretty friggin' cool.

The end goal is to have a pop-out window that appears when a person logs into the help desk. Technician's name would automatically connect to the chat (no passwords as of yet). Also, shouldn't t really make it a widget since it would live at the dashboard, but feasibly, you could use something like this on the user portal.

It's extremely lightweight and requires no client - just a web browser.

What do you guys think? Has anyone else here worked with Node.js?

[scottalanmiller]

I've used Node.js only enough to go "oh, that's cool." Obviously NodeBB runs on Node.js and powers MangoLassi, but we didn't write it.

[Rob Dunn]

Yeah - it does some otherwise complex things very quickly and with little coding - heck, the dynamic updating is very cool - but you know, maybe this is amazing to me because I'm just now getting into this kind of thing.

Anyway, here's what I have so far - I have some additional stuff to do, but this is the gist:
Chat link at the navbar will open up a popup window prepopulating the name field with your Spiceworks username. If the window is already open, the link will bring it back into focus.

Things to work on:

• visual notification of chat message if windows is blurred
• log/persistence if browser is refereshed
• keep only history of x amount of entries for better performance

And yes, I'm using Opera as a test browser (doing work in Firefox, authenticating as a different user in Opera) - but it actually has some nice dev tools built in.

[nadnerB]

Wowzers! That's an awesome idea!
Looks pretty good so far.

I have zero experience with node.js, I just wanted to leave some encouragement.

[Martin9700]

I'm concerned that something is missing from your Network Scan though. This is a cool feature, though!

[thanksajdotcom]

This is so cool!

[scottalanmiller]

Perfect timing, this deal is today:

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[Rob Dunn]

Whoa, those are some good deals!

I paid around $40 for a jQuery book about a month back...

[scottalanmiller]

You should subscribe to their sale email. Two books minimum daily.