This is a web-based multi-user chat application using Vert.x together with SockJS. It's not production ready and is only a demonstration of what you can do with these technologies.
Haloworld presents you with a chat interface. In the chat is a chat bot called Hal who can answer some of your questions and can be extended to answer more. Currently he can talk to Wolfram Alpha to answer a small set of questions and he can also spit back some statistics on the JVM heap usage and uptime.
To install Haloworld, do the following:
- Clone the vertx-haloworld repository
- You'll also need to download the Vert.x distribution and make sure that the bin directory is on your path. Haloworld was developed and tested against Vert.x 1.0-final. Note that Vert.x needs JDK 1.7.0 or later to run.
- If you want to try out the Wolfram Alpha integration, you will need to get yourself a Wolfra API key. Then browse to src/mods/wolfram-alpha and change the constant field API_KEY in class com.shinetech.mods.wolframalpha.WolframAlphaVerticle (sorry for the hard coding - will fix this later!).
- Run the Ant build script. The build script expects you to pass in the path to your Vert.x installation as a property. E.g.: ant -DVERTX_HOME=~/Software/vert.x-1.0.final. The build script will create a folder called dist in the current directory.
To run, execute bin/haloworld.sh in a console. Then browse to http://localhost:8080/.
When you first load the demo you'll be prompted to enter a chat name to login. Once you do that the main page will appear and you'll see a chat window in the right hand side of the page. If everything is running properly, within a second or two you should see a message from the chat bot Hal welcoming you to the chat. If you login from multiple browser sessions you can use the app as a simple multi-user chat.
The left side of the page is used for displaying answers to questions that you ask Hal. To ask a question, simply prefix it with Hal's chat handle @hal.
Some examples are:
- @hal what time is it?
- @hal when did Albert Einstein live?
- @hal show me the server stats
- @hal what is the population of Australia?
If you have any questions, feel free to email me at [simon.collins@shinetech.com](mailto:simon.collins@shinetech.com?subject=Question about vertx-haloworld demo).