Let me begin by saying that up until now I have experimented lightly with node.js at best. I've picked it up a on-and-off a few times over the past year or two and never had the chance to really dug my heels in.

This project is the result of my first two days with SailsJS.

A little background on me: I have been primarily focused on MVC/PHP/Laravel 4+ development for the past year or so (and more than happy with the experience) had my eye on spending some time with node.js for some time now and have

I've seen SailsJS pop up more and more in conversations recently, so when I was tasked with creating a web development tutorial I thought, "Why not?!".

What is SailsJS, you ask?

From the SailsJS Homepage

Sails.js make it easy to build custom, enterprise-grade Node.js apps. It is designed to mimic the MVC pattern of frameworks like Ruby on Rails, but with support for the requirements of modern apps: data-driven APIs with scalable, service-oriented architecture. It's especially good for building chat, realtime dashboards, or multiplayer games.

SailsCall: A node.js Real-Time Web-Based Chat Application built using the SailsJS MVC framework.

In other words, something pretty damn cool using nothing but JavaScript ;)

Installation & System Requirements

I am by no means going to cover from ground up development environment setup, installation of node.js, and all of that other good stuff.

• Preferably a *nix environent (... Vagrant?!)
• node.js installed
• SailsJS
• Your IDE weapon of choice (which of course is Sublime Text :) )

However once your initial dev machine is setup it really just boils down to this:

sudo npm -g install sails
sails new testProject
cd testProject
sails lift
# You're golden

Getting Started Docs (SailsJS)

Let's get started

A grossly simplified overview from an MVC standpoint

Model

Think of this as your data. These files are located in the ProjectName/api/models directory

Model: ChatRoom

// ProjectName/api/models/ChatRoom.js
/**
 * ChatRoom
 *
 * @module      :: Model
 * @description :: A short summary of how this model works and what it represents.
 * @docs        :: http://sailsjs.org/#!documentation/models
 */

module.exports = {

  attributes: {

    title : {
        type: 'string',
        required: true
    },
    slug  : {
        type: 'string',
        required: true,
        unique: true,
        regex: '^[a-z-]+'
    }

  }

};

Model: StatusUpdate

// ProjectName/api/models/StatusUpdate.js
/**
 * StatusUpdate
 *
 * @module      :: Model
 * @description :: A short summary of how this model works and what it represents.
 * @docs        :: http://sailsjs.org/#!documentation/models
 */

module.exports = {

  attributes: {

    chatroom_id: {
        type: 'integer',
        required: true
    },

    username: {
        type: 'string',
        required: true
    },

    content: {
        type: 'string',
        required: true
    }

  }

};

• Chat Rooms
• Status Updates

View

Think of this as the end result you see in the browser (i.e. HTML, templates, etc...)

• Home Page
• Chat Room

Controller

Think of this as the traffic director.

• One Primary Controller
• One controller per Model (RESTful API)

Ok, Enough With the Details...

Here is what SailsCall SHOULD be able to do

• A user can create a public chat room *(based on a unique "slug" such as "vt3000-presentation")
• A user can input a "slug" on the homepage and be redirected to a valid chat room
• Users can set their "Nickname" to whatever they fancy (G-rated of course)
• ... and yes. Users can chat amongst each other until pigs fly.

Sounds simple enough right?

About the code... let's take a peak shall we?

SailsJS Codebase Hosted on GitHub

Commence Whirlwind tour of...

• Routes
• Models
• Views
• Controllers

Routes

// routes.js

module.exports.routes = {

  '/': {
    view: 'home/index'
  },

  'post /redirect': 'ChatRoomController.redirect',

  '/chat/:chat_slug': {
    controller: 'ChatRoomController',
    action: 'render'
  }
}
  

One More Thing... the Demo!

Of course: Link to SailsCall Demo

Note that you can click the link in the header, create a new chatroom with a slug of your choice, and invite others there.

Also: this is in an extremely untested state. Beware of any mysterious errors that may occur.

My pre-emptive apologies for the day that this demo link is down

Want to run it yourself? Just remember (roughly)

git clone
cd ProjectDirectory
npm install
sails lift

Inspired Partially By SailsChat