Not long ago I was shopping around for potential chat solutions for an app I wanted to develop, and I came across this project. On the surface, the user-interf

Not long ago I was shopping around for potential chat solutions for an app I wanted to develop, and I came across this project. On the surface, the user-interface is not very polished. I'm not sure if this is intended to be an implementation detail of the consumer of this solution, bring-your-own-frontend style, or otherwise. Additionally, the dependencies sound heavy. Express, Jade; PostgreSQL, Redis; socket.io, jQuery... Of course these are answers to real problems—api, views, persistent storage, a message cache, communication layer, a view layer. But the chances of me building anything on top of this or embedding it in another application are tiny because it already brings so much to the table.