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Chat Application

A simple real-time chat application with two different ways to communicate: Long Polling and WebSocket. It also supports likes and dislikes feature.
The goal of this project was to understand the difference between those approaches by building it ourselves.

Project structure

Both implementations are located on one branch in a corresponding folder with independent package.json and frontend

Technologies used

  • Runtime environment: Node.js
  • Packages: cors, websocket, express.

How It Works

Long Polling

The frontend sends a request to the backend every second to check for new messages.

WebSocket

The frontend maintains a persistent connection, allowing the backend to push updates instantly when new messages arrive.

This setup highlights the performance and efficiency differences between the two approaches.

How to get started

cd long-polling/backend
npm install
node backend.js
  • open client.js in your browser

The same process for the websocket version:

cd websocket/backend
npm install
node backend.js
  • open client.js in your browser

Learning Outcomes

  • Understand client-server communication
  • Compare real-time communication strategies
  • Learn WebSocket fundamentals
  • Learn long polling trade-offs