Ruby on Rails 3 - Public Live Chat

Ruby on Rails 3 - Public live chat

I'd start by checking out Ilya Grigorik's em-synchony + examples and looking at the code for the Hector private chat server gem.

See and talk to your currently online users on your site in a Ruby on Rails 3 application

How can I accurately monitor who is currently on the site and instantly remove from list when they leave?

Well using HTTP you can not do this "instantly" in a browser. Almost all solutions I see use a heartbeat technique. Every X seconds, a request is sent from the browser (using Ajax), that tells if the user is online. If you haven't heard from the user in x heartbeats, you regard the user as disconnected - even Facebook uses this, it seems. I will recommend you to drop your requirement for instant, unless it's really important.

Another approach is to implement Flash or Silverlight, to make a socket connection to the server. But the demand on the server is high, and if many people is on your site, you will run into trouble with ports and so on.

Chat belongs_to two instances of User, and User has_many :chats (ruby on rails )

I would suggest these changes (with assistance from @TonyArra):

• Chats have_many messages
• Message belongs_to a chat
• Chats have_and_belongs_to_many (or belongs_to) users
• Users have_and_belongs_to_many (or have_many) chats

This would be the conventional way to model this, and I think it would support your use cases.

I mentioned YAGNI in the comments because the OP mentioned chats only having two users. YAGNI (you aren't going to need it, so don't built it now) is a great principle. However, many chat programs support more than two users, and sometimes just one user. You could argue that building the data model with that consideration in mind is pragmatic.

Great further reading on that subject: Preemptive Pluralization is (Probably) Not Evil

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