I’m releasing nochan, a BBS built on Node.js and MongoDB. I thought it would be a good idea to share my experience working on this project.

It started as a school project during my master at EPFL. The project I chose was called “Large scale web chat application” and was apparently related to the Distributed Information System Laboratory. I didn’t follow any course in this lab and I didn’t know a lot about distributed systems. But I liked the project description and I was eager to learn how to build cutting-edge web applications.
The goal of the project was to analyse different mechanisms the web allows for realtime communication on a website. Then choosing a stack of software, build a distributed application and analyze the scalability of the architecture.

Today the demo project has turned into a more robust application : NoChan. In fact it looks nothing like the application I tested at the time. I have tried to integrate (and desintegrate :p) many new libraries written by talented JavaScript developpers. It’s been frustrating many times working in this unsteady environment, having to debug through other’s code for every library you are using. Finally, I really liked it, I improved my skills in JavaScript, Open Source development, Git, Events, NoSQL, Comet or HTML5.

I have often put this project aside as I moved to other things, but the possibilities offered by Node brought me back and I finally found a goal for it.
So today I present to you a cool board application where you can share images, music and videos… And when I say share I mean stream data instantaneously to every interested visitors. Well try it for yourself!