tudordascalu / chat

This is a MEAN stack application

MEAN Chat Application

A small chat application built using the MEAN stack

Features

Register and authenticate users using JSON web tokens

Open 1on1 private conversations with a user of your choice

Notifications for messages on background conversations

Have a pleasant UI/UX built to look awesome from mobile to desktop

Getting started

Prerequisites

if you don't know what you are doing go on the website and follow the instructions, those are pretty straight forward NodeJS MongoDB Angular-CLI

clone the repo

git clone https://github.com/tudordascalu/chat.git

change into the repo directory

cd chat

install server dependencies

npm install

change into the angular src directory

cd angular-src

install frontend dependencies

npm install

start the server

cd ../ && npm start

in another terminal window

cd /angular-src && npm start

Then visit http://localhost:4200 in your browser.

##Technologies NodeJS - JavaScript backend/server-side solution of choice

Express - Node framework that makes handling http requests with ease

JsonWebToken - package that helps with generating JWTs for secure authentication

PassportJS - authentication middleware used to guard certain parts of the app for non-authenticated requests

MongoDB - data storage solution that just speaks JSON and pairs very well with Node

Mongoose - package that helps with object modeling and manages connection between server and database

Socket.io - web sockets implementation, fast and reliable real-time communication engine

Angular - rich frontend web framework, helps creating fast, reliable web applications

Angular-CLI - command line interface for streamlined angular development

TypeScript - superset of JavaScript that can be compiler-checked, also has types!!

MomentJS - JavaScript date/time parser

Bootstrap - CSS/JS framework, makes it easy to develop responsive, well polished web apps

##How it works On the client-side users can create accounts that will be stored in the database. Then users can authenticate with the given credentials, if those are correct the server sends a unique token to the client. The client stores it for use on restricted backend route requests.

Once authenticated, the server creates a socket bidirectional connection with the client to facilitate the chat functionality.

Every time a user sends a message, this goes to the server which redirects it to the desired respondent. Also every time a user enters or leaves chat, the server announces all the connected clients.

##Motivation This is a personal project with the purpose of better understanding the client-server communication paradigm, new web technologies.