Alright, so with the blog and forum components slowly shaping up I thought I’d try my hand at putting together a chat client for the SiteHub project. I don’t know if I’ll be building tutorials for this one, most of the groundwork is covered pretty well by the RailsCast crew here and if you’ve followed my other tutorials you will probably be able to get most of the features done easily without my instruction.

The one part that did really cause some headache was getting the “Users Online” thingamajig working. I ended up using three AJAX helpers, creating a session, navigating to another page (not including direct URL entry/back button unfortunately) and a heartbeat signal that all clients send every 10 seconds and lapses of 15 seconds cause the client to be marked as disconnected.

Not sure how else I’ll expand it from here, there’s a raft of possible features but I’m thinking about starting to amalgamate all the SiteHub project parts into one thing so they share some common entities.