The intantness of chat apps has always been a mystery to me.
The technical details of moving emojis through The Internet Pipes and across continents in 0.004 miliseconds is well beyond my paygrade.
But I got a tiny window of insight into the magic while illustrating notes for Mark Barton’s course on building chat apps with Vue and Socket.io
https://egghead.io/courses/vue-and-socket-io-for-real-time-communication
Turns out it’s not magic, but instead done through websockets . Which are like little portals that hold open a consistent connection between two machines.
I obviously still haven’t a clue what goes on inside that dark little portal. Thankfully using tools like Vue & Socket.io save us from that level of depth.
Want more illustrated notes on web development?
Take a look at Essential Web Security Tactics