HTML5 What's App Clone
A big swiss financial company approached us with the idea of creating a What's App clone for their internal communication needs.
The current mobile browsers on all platforms (Android, iOS, Symbian and yes, even the newer Blackberries) are capable of many features, that still lack in Internet Explorer or other Desktop browsers. So we implemented it as HTML5/CSS3 based mobile web application.
But we couldn't stop just there, so we expanded the idea of What's App with a simple poking feature and an iPad optimized UI.
It's entirely made with JavaScript, also on the Server side, because we used Node.js, a JavaScript execution environment based on the famous V8 JavaScript engine. The asynchronous, event-driven approach of Node handles many chat groups without hogging on the servers resources at all. To further facilitate this, we used Redis as Datastore, which served the purpose well and delivers mind-boggling performance without showing up in 'top' (cpu/memory statistic on Linux) ever....
We could have stopped here, instead we implemented a realtime administration UI, a statistics module and a low-level Redis key editor.
Did we mention that it looks like a native app and can be installed locally on iOS devices?
Monday, December 05, 2011, Andre Bossard