Socket.IO

Data visualisation is becoming an increasingly important subject. As the complexity an volumes of data increase, it is getting harder and harder to make sense of bare arrays of numbers without relevant visualisation models. Let me give you a good example. Right now I work in China. Few months ago there appeared a new startup: bycicle sharing service that used GPS sensors on each bike to track it in the city. Now let's imagine, you need analyse how evenly your bikes are distributed around the city and how many of them are in motion right now.

The way that people use internet evolved from static pages to Ajax and now to realtime web supported by standards like WebSockets and WebRTC. Making a real-time application, like chat, became increadibly easy with the help of platforms like Node.js and libraries like Socket.io. In this post we'll see how to create a minimalistic chat application form the scratch. Create a separate folder for your new project and type `npm init` in it. Then, install the required dependencies.