DEPRECATED: This example is no longer maintained and is kept only for reference purposes.

Play Scala Chatroom Example

This is a simple fork by Clever Cloud of a chatroom using Play and Websockets with the Scala API.

🚀 Deploy this repo on Clever Cloud

You can deploy this repo as a Scala+SBT app on Clever Cloud.

📖 Check our Scala+SBT documentation for further configuration

Environment variabales

Inject the following environment variables:

APPLICATION_SECRET="<your-app-secret>"
CC_JAVA_VERSION="11"
URL="<deployed-app-url>"

📖 Check all environment variables your can use on Clever Cloud

About this project

This project makes use of dynamic streams from Akka Streams, notably BroadcastHub and MergeHub. By combining MergeHub and BroadcastHub, you can get publish/subscribe functionality.

The good bit

The flow is defined once in the controller, and used everywhere from the chat action:

import javax.inject._
import play.api.mvc._

import akka.stream.scaladsl._
import scala.concurrent._

class HomeController @Inject()(val controllerComponents: ControllerComponents) extends BaseController {

    private type WSMessage = String

  // chat room many clients -> merge hub -> broadcasthub -> many clients
  private val (chatSink, chatSource) = {

    // Don't log MergeHub$ProducerFailed as error if the client disconnects.
    // recoverWithRetries -1 is essentially "recoverWith"
    val source = MergeHub.source[WSMessage]
      .log("source")
      .recoverWithRetries(-1, { case _: Exception => Source.empty })

    val sink = BroadcastHub.sink[WSMessage]
    source.toMat(sink)(Keep.both).run()
  }

  private val userFlow: Flow[WSMessage, WSMessage, _] = {
    Flow[WSMessage].via(Flow.fromSinkAndSource(chatSink, chatSource)).log("userFlow")
  }

  def chat: WebSocket = {
    WebSocket.acceptOrResult[WSMessage, WSMessage] {
      case rh if sameOriginCheck(rh) =>
        Future.successful(userFlow).map { flow =>
          Right(flow)
        }.recover {
          case e: Exception =>
            Left(InternalServerError("Cannot create websocket"))
        }

      case rejected =>
        Future.successful {
          Left(Forbidden("forbidden"))
        }
    }
  }
}

Prerequisites to run this project locally

You will need JDK 11 and sbt installed.

Running

sbt run

Go to http://localhost:9000 and open it in two different browsers. Typing into one browser will cause it to show up in another browser.

Tributes

This project is originally taken from Johan Andrén's Akka-HTTP version:

Johan also has a blog post explaining dynamic streams in more detail:

• http://markatta.com/codemonkey/blog/2016/10/02/chat-with-akka-http-websockets/