potato

The Potato open source chat platform has a Common Lisp backend and a Clojurescript frontend. There is a fascinating talk by one of the authors on Youtube [0], and the code is on github [1]. A relatively new Web Application Environment called Radiance may also be worth looking at.[2] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bl8jQ2wRh6k [1] https://github.com/cicakhq/potato [2] https://shirakumo.github.io/radiance/

We also used to use IRC, but then after realising that we wanted some of the features of Slack (a persistent, searchable log of messages for example), so we went and developed such an application that had all the features we needed. It even has some features that Slack still don't have, even though they have hundreds of developers and we were two guys working on the evenings. We also released it fully open source. https://github.com/cicakhq/potato

It's not zero effort, but it's low effort. Implementing the important features of Slack (specifically the ones you mention) is not hard. I know that because me and one other person did that as a weekend project over a few months[1]. It's not because we're the most amazing developers in the world, but (Sure, not as poslished but that would only take one more designer to fix.) What I'm saying here is that GP is correct, and you are significantly overestimating the value of what Slack provides. They have the mindshare right now, but that's really all. They don't even the benefits a company like Facebook has, since a Slack competitor is still useful if a small number of people use it, as opposed to social media companies who are not useful at all unless they have a large userbase. [1] https://github.com/cicakhq/potato

CouchDB supports writing views in Erlang, if you prefer that. It's also faster than Javascript, although it changes some of the ordering semantics of the resulting views. I decided to write my views[1] in Parenscript[2]. Might not be for everybody, but it makes them fit a lot better in the rest of the application. [1] https://github.com/cicakhq/potato/blob/72e162a95332e8979d865... [2] https://common-lisp.net/project/parenscript/

In Potato we did exactly this. The server side is written in Common Lisp and the client side is implemented in Clojurescript. While I have to say that it has worked pretty well, Lisp and Clojurescript are different enough that it really isn't much of a benefit to use both together. Even the S-expression format of the two languages are so different that we need to use JSON when sending messages from the server to the client (and vice versa, of course). Please feel free to look at the code if you want to learn more about how it's done. I'll be happy to answer any questions: https://github.com/cicakhq/potato

Well, the project is a Slack-like application. It's open source, so you're welcome to have a look at the code: https://github.com/cicakhq/potato I have written a few blog posts about the architecture, but unfortunately not too much on the web part. I intend to write some more, and also make some videos showing how nice it is to develop a web application in the same process as the server is running.

At the risk of being accused of blowing one's own horn, we have an open source project which implements a Slack-like platform. It's been in production for well over a year for us and has worked quite well. We implemented it when we realised that there were no such products available that was open source and self-hosted. Another neat feature (in my opinion, of course) is that it's implemented in Lisp, which makes it much more fun to develop for. Github repository: https://github.com/cicakhq/potato Demo server: https://potato.dhsdevelopments.com/