Build a Messaging System with Rails and ActionCable

In the past few months, I've received many questions about Mailboxer and therefore decided to explain how to create a custom messaging system for Rails. Of course, this system will not provide all of the features Mailboxer has, but it will be more than enough for many application. When you fully understanding how this system works, it'll be much easier to further enhance it.

This article is going to be divided into two parts:

• The first part will cover preparations, associations setup, and the creation of controllers and views. We will also add support for Emoji. By the end of this part, you will have a working messaging system.
• The second part will explain how to utilize ActionCable to implement a real-time messaging and notification system. ActionCable is probably the most anticipated feature of Rails 5 and I already covered it some time ago. On top of that, we will also implement "user is online" functionality.

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by Ilya Bodrov-Krukowski via SitePoint