Hi,

I'm hawking a bit of advise here if possible.

As the title suggests I need to build out a chat application into an existing Angular app. The client has requested it work in the same way as WhatsApp. I have built a proof of concept that runs of my existing API and just polls using setInterval once the user is signed in. This works ok for proof of concept but I am now looking to throw this into production.

My initial thoughts are using socket.io but I wanted to see if anyone else had either a better suggestion or had already used socket.io for this type of chat application and had any pointers that might help as I have never used sockets.

I currently have a few database tables chat_group, chat_group_members, chat_group_messages. These are in mySQL but I have no real need to leave the data within the main application database. I also have a table called chat_group_unread which holds a key made up of the groupID & userID and holds a count of the current unread messages. This is not actually a count of individual messages as once the user clicks the group to view the message stream the count is set to 0 again.

My main need is to be able to manage the counter in the menu in realtime and to be able to retrieve all previous messages when the user enters the group. I am using rxjs subjects (chatGroups$, chatGroup$, unreadCount$) so when a user enters a group the group is pushed to the chatGroup$ subject along with the messages.

Apologies for the long rambling explanation, any help greatly appreciated.

x