CherryChat and the CherryChat tutorial have been on the website as long as I’ve known about Orbited, but finally they not alone, having now been joined by a RailsChat tutorial. Ruby on Rails is kind of a beast: it installs hundreds of (from my point of view) useless files and directories, and requires a developer to run a script to create a new section of a site. But I suppose it works well enough for what it’s designed for. After giving up on the discussion in the #rubyonrails channel, I asked some Ruby programmer friends how to save state, and they explained to me that adding $ before a variable name makes it global. Not long later, RailsChat was finished. The client-side code in RailsChat is pretty much copied directly from CherryChat. And the resulting apps behave pretty much identically.

It is however amusing to compare the directory structure of each version:

CherryChat:

RailsChat:

And of course the money shot (a working chat app!):

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