The message form and jQuery
In this section you're going to add a form field to your index.html
file. This is going to render an input field and a button to the screen, and the user is going to be able to interact with that as opposed to having to call socket.emit
from the Developer Tools
, which is not a sustainable option for real users. This only works for us developers.
Now in order to get started we're going to be editing index.html
, then we're going to move into index.js
. We're going to add a listener that's going to wait for the form to be submitted, and inside of that listener callback, we are going to fire socket.emit
with the data typed in the field. We're also going to take a moment to render all incoming messages to the screen. At the end of this section, we'll have a ugly, yet working, chat application.
Using the jQuery library
Now before we do any of that, we are going to be using a library called jQuery to do DOM manipulation, which means that we want to be able to do stuff with...