NAME
    Chatty -- Real-time (comet) chat application using Catalyst

SYNOPSIS
        # install perl dependencies; skip to the next set of instructions
        # while the dependencies are installing
        cpan Catalyst::Devel
        perl Makefile.PL
        make installdeps

        # install nginx (or install and configure some other reverse proxy)
        # configure nginx and run it
        sudo cp extra/nginx.conf /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
        sudo /etc/rc.d/nginx start

        # configure the comet server (see L<http://meteorserver.org/>)
        sudo cp extra/cometd/meteord.conf.dist /etc/meteord.conf
        # add the 'SubscriberDocumentRoot' option to meteord.conf;
        # it should be set to $REPOSITORY_ROOT/extra/cometd/public_html
        # run meteord (in another terminal)
        ./extra/cometd/meteord -d

        # configure hostnames
        sudo cat extra/hosts >>/etc/hosts

        # create the user database
        sqlite3 db/info.db <db/schema.sql

        # finally, run the application and try it out
        ./script/chatty_server.pl -f
        firefox http://chatty.com/

DESCRIPTION
    This is a toy web application implementing real-time (comet) chat. I
    wrote this as an exercise to see how easy it would be to write such an
    application using Perl/Catalyst. It was fairly easy.

    Catalyst itself provides no streaming support or message bus, so I am
    using a dedicated comet server to handle all of that, meteord. However,
    in order to get meteord to work, it needs to be serving on the same port
    as the Catalyst app. I accomplished this by using nginx as a reverse
    proxy. However, you can't just use localhost because meteord does some
    checks on the hostname to make sure it will not run into any
    cross-domain restrictions, and those checks barf if the hostname doesn't
    have a TLD. The fix for this is to just assign some fake hostnames to
    localhost; the provided nginx configuration uses chatty.com for the
    Catalyst app and data.chatty.com for the comet server, both on port
    number 80. The actual Catalyst app runs on port 3000 and meteord runs on
    port 4670. That's the reason for the complicated setup.

    The perl dependencies can all be installed locally in a subdirectory of
    the user's home directory using local::lib, like this:

        # install local::lib (see L<http://search.cpan.org/dist/local-lib/>)
        # then,
        eval $(perl -I$HOME/perl5/lib/perl5 -Mlocal::lib)

    It is also usually much nicer to work with cpanminus rather than plain
    old cpan:

        # install cpanminus
        curl -L http://cpanmin.us | perl - --self-upgrade

BUGS
    Tests are sadly nonexistent. :-(

AUTHOR
    Charles McGarvey <chazmcgarvey at brokenzipper.com>

LICENSE
    This library is free software. You can redistribute it and/or modify it
    under the same terms as Perl itself.