I noticed that my little chat demo was down and instead of simply restarting it I thought I would take the opportunity to make some necessary updates. Specifically, I went ahead and updated to the latest stable version of NodeJS and Socket.io - which nicely wraps up functionality for emitting JSON events, eliminating the need for some of the code I had. As I was updating the code I decided to also use this as an opportunity to poke around with CoffeeScript some. If you aren't familiar with it, CoffeeScript is a nice little language created on top of JavaScript (it compiles to JavaScript) that aims to "expose the good parts of JavaScript in a simple way." In re-writing the Chat in CoffeeScript I certainly found it nice to work with, producing typically smaller and clearer code. Although I added a few new bits of functionality (private messages, nicknames), the chat is still pretty simple and doesn't amount to much code so I hope some people out there continue to find it a useful example.