ChatEngine is a framework product I prototyped for PubNub as part of the Office of the CTO. As we saw an increasing number of customers looking for chat solutions at PubNub, I was challenged with creating a framework to make creating chat easy.

I prototyped ChatEngine as a cross-platform Javascript framework compatible with NodeJS, React Native, and of course, the web. ChatEngine utilizes the infrastructure provided by PubNub to offer prebuilt tools, especially for customers building chat.

ChatEngine was Object Oriented in design and extensible. This allowed us to create small Node packages that acted as feature flags for typing Indicators, online-lists, and image embeds. A team of 4 created and documented 25 plugins.

One of the most interesting things about ChatEngine is the ability to drop in plugins that extend the framework. Adding functionality like a typing indicator is as easy as typing “npm install chat-engine-typing-indicator” and wiring up the provided methods to your UI.

At the time of writing, ChatEngine is hotlinked 3 million times per month via jsDelivr and installed 8,000 times a month via NPM.

After we completed our MVP, I worked to document and form a team around ChatEngine. PubNub now operates a team and continues to support the product.

Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9c0vOkTFec