Creating a project

To begin developing our chat application, we need to create an Opa project using the following Opa command:

opa create chat

This command will create an empty Opa project. Also, it will generate the required directories and files automatically with the structure as shown in the following screenshot:

Let's have a brief look at what these source code files do:

• controller.opa: This file serves as the entry point of the chat application; we start the web server in controller.opa

• view.opa: This file serves as an user interface

• model.opa: This is the model of the chat application; it defines the message, network, and the chat room

• style.css: This is an external stylesheet file

• Makefile: This file is used to build an application

As we do not need database support in the chat application, we can remove --import-package stdlib.database.mongo from the FLAG option in Makefile. Type make and make run to run the empty application.