Real-time online chat

Single page chat application. One or more user(s) log(s) in into a chat room. Messages of a user are broadcasted to the channel.

This project consists of two modules. The backend ( in the subfolder backend) contains the JWT based authentication microservice (written in Node.js) as well as a RESTful API for chatrooms. Both microservices utilizes MongoDB as datastore. For the delivery of messages, this project is using Apache Kafka. The frontend (in the subfolder frontend) contains a React based SPA application.

Features

• mobile friendly responsive layout
• User sign in
• User sign up
• create a new chat room
• listing of chat rooms created by the user as well as other users
• exclusion of chat room
• join an existing chatroom
• when an user access the chatroom, all previous messages are available
• user can send rich text formatting to each other using HTML tags
• user can embed images in his messages using the HTML IMG tag
• Users see status messages such as "User n typing..." and "User n is online"

Backend

In order to start all the required backend services, first you have to install Docker and Docker Compose on your machine. After installed, go to the backend subfolder and run

docker-compose up

This command starts several services, like the authentication endpoint, the chatrooms endpoint, the Mondodb instance, Apache Kafka, and Apache Kakfa Rest Proxy.

Frontend

The frontend for this single page application was written with React and Material-UI. In order to start, ensure you have Node version 12 and npm >= 6.10.3. After installed, go to the frontend subfolder and run

npm install && npm start

You can access the main page through http://localhost:3000

Tech stack

• Backend

  • Node.js (v12.10)
  • Express.Js
  • JWT
  • MongoDB
  • mongoose
  • eslint
  • prettier
  • Docker / Docker compose
  • Apache Kafka
  • Confluent Kafka REST Proxy

• Frontend

  • React
  • Material-UI
  • axios