User chat system

[codeanticode]

To allow communication between registered users (artists/hosts/visitors). Some resources:

https://www.twilio.com/blog/multi-room-web-chat-flask-react-twilio-conversations

https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/simple-chat-app-with-react-flask-b2ae72404fcb

https://github.com/etmoore/socketio-flask-react-chat

https://chaewonkong.github.io/posts/socket-io.html

[codeanticode]

This other tutorial seems quite straightforward (Node+React, no Flask though):

https://medium.com/swlh/build-a-real-time-chat-app-with-react-hooks-and-socket-io-4859c9afecb0

Source code: https://github.com/pixochi/socket.io-react-hooks-chat

I was able to incorporate their components into the chat-test branch :-)

Getting an No 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' error Fixed with https://github.com/codeanticode/oasis-server/commit/6cfadb35bd8b495c9b1085e6a7c4a78fcec34a6b, https://github.com/codeanticode/oasis-server/commit/2527be1693fe50d9d011b6547abf217432543d0b, and https://github.com/codeanticode/oasis-server/commit/d6b7d77dc9d5e9c38d36e0c74ab93cd6bc8cc59d (Flask development server is not compatible with socketio as discussed here)

Very important: When using gunicorn as web server, one must specify eventlet or gevent workers, otherwise the socketio events will not be handled by the app, see deployment details:

https://flask-socketio.readthedocs.io/en/latest/#deployment

[codeanticode]

Features of the chat system:

• Only available when users (hosts, artists, or visitors) are logged in.
• When a user is logged, they will see a chat button next to the user's profile.
• If the other user is not logged in, it should appear as offline, with a message saying that user is offline but oasis will send a notification (in principle, an email)
• Chat messages should be in a window on desktop, take up entire screen on mobile.
• Chat messages should allow ref urls, so users can send zoom links, etc.
• Chat history should be saved in the db (at some point)

Some resources

• For authentication, see this section in the flask-socketio docs: https://flask-socketio.readthedocs.io/en/latest/#authentication
• For sending emails from Flask, see this tutorial on flask-mail: https://overiq.com/flask-101/sending-email-in-flask/
• SMS notifications might be used as well: https://pypi.org/project/smsframework Twilio's libs are enough: https://www.twilio.com/docs/sms/quickstart/python?code-sample=code-send-an-sms-using-twilio&code-language=Python&code-sdk-version=6.x

[codeanticode]

Beware of version incompatibilities between python-socketio (server) and socket.io-client:

https://github.com/miguelgrinberg/python-socketio/issues/578

About not receiving messages from client:

https://github.com/miguelgrinberg/Flask-SocketIO/issues/1038

Security considerations:

https://stackoverflow.com/a/59543084

Push notifications in React:

https://itnext.io/react-push-notifications-with-hooks-d293d36f4836