• List conversations for user
• Create conversation with another user
• List messages in conversation
• Create messages in conversation
• Read status
• Announcements This is a feature I'd really like to see in the product. It's a little jarring to see messages auto-sent from buyer and seller when a sale is made. Good fit for single table inheritance, allowing automated messages from neither participant or from moderators.
• Multiple participants The pieces are all there. Group chat is only a controller change away.
• Paginate collection endpoints

Regret not choosing names "thread" and "member" instead of "conversation" and "participation."

Payloads are minimal - without more endpoints, relies on client to keep some state to denormalize things like participating users.

Many-to-many participants makes for more expensive queries in some places but enables lots of features that would be difficult to implement without it. see: read receipts and group chat. It's a good fit for the product in question, for a more spastic chat app would need to consider backgrounding or caching in those places.

Requires ruby 2.4 and postgres 9.6. Set the DATABASE_ADDRESS DATABASE_USERNAME and DATABASE_PASSWORD environment variables to connect to your database. Alternatively use the included docker compose configuration and get started with docker-compose up.

Run rails db:create db:migrate then start the server. rails s

Provide the username param to requests to "authenticate." A user is created if one does not exist with that name.

curl 'http://chat.docker/api/conversations?username=xXjulianXx'
curl 'http://chat.docker/api/conversations?username=anth0ny'
curl -X POST 'http://chat.docker/api/conversations?username=xXjulianXx&to=anth0ny'
curl -X POST 'http://chat.docker/api/conversations/$CONVERSATION_ID/messages?username=xXjulianXx' \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  --data '{ "message": { "body": "would you accept half your list price?" } }'
curl 'http://chat.docker/api/conversations/$CONVERSATION_ID/messages?username=anth0ny'

rspec