Chat Implementation with RESTful (Ruby) and Web Socket

Slides for talk at Saigon.rb March 2016

Transcript

1. Chat implementation in Ruby and Websocket Cam Huynh (@huynhquancam)
2. Cam Huynh Software Enbugger @ Dadadee
3. actioncable
4. What this talk is about? • What we experienced during the development of Dadadee chat system. • Technologies we’ve considered during the development. • Problems we faced and how we solved them.
5. Functionality Requirement • Integrate realtime chat function to our existing Android and iOS app. • Web services built upon Ruby on Rails.
6. Our Back-end Resources • Two Plain Old Ruby Developers. • Our application built upon Ruby on Rails. • Limited NodeJS experience.
7. Technology taken into considerations • XMPP. • Pure NodeJS with Socket.IO • Long polling (Message Bus) in Ruby.
8. Socket.IO Pros: • Rich documentations and guides. • Easy to start off, fast development. • Support both of Android and iOS (by native JS executor). • 23k stars on Github. Cons: • Rewrite the domain logics in Javascript. • Lack of experience in Javascript. • Callback Hell. > Manage logics in Javascript is the most horrible thing Rubyists could think of.
9. Message Bus Pros: * Extracted from Discourse, by Sam Saffron. * Written in Ruby. * Awesome DSL. Cons: * Have no SDKs for Android and iOS yet, and our mobile guys have ZERO experience in Javascript. * Only polling and long polling, no websocket support. * Leverage on Redis PUBSUB, no other backend supported.
10. Pros • Simple installation. • Robust, well-tested. • Mature and widely adopted. • iOS and Android clients are available. > We decided to give OpenFire a try. OpenFire (XMPP) Cons • We have zero Java experience • Bad, complicated management user interface. • Bad message history archives. • Poor RESTful (so-called) API. • Troublesome clustering. • Inactive development. > The failure of the year.
11. we are stuck! SocketIO / MessageBus: too tedious and risky. OpenFire (XMPP): the failure of the year.
12. https://github.com/duythinht/chat-system
13. RESTful Web Service Push Service Client POST messages/ Websocket PUBSUB MQ publish subscribe
14. Existing RoR web service Socket.IO Client POST messages/ Websocket Redis publish subscribe
15. The RESTful approach Utilize current codebase, domain logics, service. Better extractability. Microservice. Good Testability.
16. Demo / Q&A
17. https://github.com/huynhquancam/chat-stack
18. thanks!