Tutorial: How to build your own peer-to-peer chat app (like Couple)

hipmob.com

55 points·kunle··9 comments

So my understanding is that this is not really peer-to-peer in the sense that connections are made with a server in the middle of two clients. Unless I got something wrong, connections are not handled stirctly from a client to another.

Or am I completely lost?

You're not completely lost at all - your description is correct. All connections are made with a server in the middle.

Then it's not peer-to-peer.

Hey everyone - Ayo from Hipmob here. We published Couple a few days ago and thought it would be helpful to show how we put it together. We've also published the source on github (https://github.com/Hipmob) so you can take a look at the server & client side bits if you want. Would love feedback at ayo@hipmob.com

Just an FYI, but the website is unusable on mobile (Android ICS). The sidebar navigation completely overlaps the text when zoomed in.

You can actually test this kind of bug in Chrome; just make the width of the window little and then scroll horizontally.

The "position:fixed" breaks many things on mobile, is always better to avoid it or at least change it when the user is from a smartphone.

Thanks for flagging this for us. Can't replicate the error at the moment, but will take jQueryIsAwesome's advice. Meantime, if you get a sec please send a screenshot?

I am so offended!! Why is this only limited to any two people? What about interspecies relationships?

Hah! No users have asked for this yet, but if you can think of features you'd like that would make this super easy, we'll build em. :)

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