FOAM Chat

Chat app powered by foam. Simple text messaging for now, but long term goal to send FOAM-lets to chat memebers to enable easier FOAM collaboration.

Building and running

By default the app serves data out of /opt/foamchat

Set up this directory by doing

$ sudo mkdir /opt/foamchat
$ sudo chown <USER> /opt/foamchat

Build and run by doing

$ ./build.sh

If you want to serve out of a different directory use

$ ./build.sh "--appHome:/path/to/app/home"

TODO

• data is not real time, listeners need to be fixed
• registration doesnt work, need to set default new group (probably just needs themeing)
• styling/themeing
• sender names/timestamps
• sender avatars
• better scrolling/layout of chat messages
• permissions
• improve generic foam3 many to many picker
• mobile
  • PWA, whats the right serviceworker strategy
  • need to figure out deployment and non-deployment
• offline
  • pwa caching
  • sync dao
• notifications
• custom controller?
• richer messages
  • rich text (links/styling)
  • attachments (images/gifs/videos)
  • FOAM-lets
• end to end encryption

Deployment

Currently we do "JAR" builds on demand on the server.

There is a custom run.sh script on the server that just calls build.js

node foam3/tools/build.js -c --jar -w -Jprod

The server has a custom systemd service that invokes the run script.

When running in --jar mode, the http server detects the webroot as being inside the jar and only serves that rather than the whole source tree like we see in normal builds