React AIM

This is a little AOL instant messenger inspired chat application to practice React and API design.

The idea

It's nostalgic looking back on the days of coming home from high school and firing up AIM to see who was on and what they were doing. Luckily, someone created xp.css which does a mighty fine job emulating the look of a Windows XP application.

This is an exercise in React (as I rarely use it) and Deno (as I've never used it).

This started with "will it work?" and I've been chiseling away at areas that need fixing.

Development

One major caveat is this uses a fork of the oak-rate-limit package on github. I've merged a basic update that adds the Deno KV store, which can be found here.

Note: I'm using an import map to change the destination to the remote fork. Not sure if this will work forever or for everyone, so once I test the forked code I'll need to publish to denoland for a proper import.

As mentioned before, you'll need to have Deno installed. This is using v1.45.5.

I'm also using the denokv library as the local KV server. This uses Docker so that needs to be running.

Once all that's installed, open 3 terminals windows. In two, cd into ./server and run the following:

Start the denokv server on 4512. This is needed for Deno's key/value store. Kinda like a redis server:

• docker run -it --init -p 4512:4512 -v ./data:/data ghcr.io/denoland/denokv --sqlite-path /data/react-chat.sqlite serve --access-token qwepoi9832745 -

Start the API server on port 8000

• deno task start

Finally, cd ./client, run npm install and run the dev server:

• npm run dev

Note: I haven't tested a fresh install as of yet, so more steps might be needed

KV Viewer

A simple admin dashboard has been started in viewer to display info from the KV store in a more readable manner than browsing SQLite.

Similar deal as before:

• cd viewer/server; deno task start starts the server on :8000
• cd viewer/client; npm run dev starts the viewer on :5173 (can't run at the same time as the app client )

Misc

e2e testing has been set up but isn't fully fleshed out. I'm using playwright and it can be run via npm run test in the client dir. Tests for the server, especially rate limiting and payload validation is todo.