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.