See live app on Heroku.
(Note: This is hosted on a free Heroku server, so first loads can sometimes take up to 10 seconds.)
HTHT chat is a live chat app that allows people to chat according to their topics of interest at the moment. If our moods fluctuate as much as we try to deny it, why shouldn't our public chatrooms cater to that? HTHT stands for heart to heart talk, and I built it as my 2nd project at General Assembly as a web development student.
At any point in time there can be tens or hundreds of chat rooms, but you can only belong to one. Each room has a 5 people limit to ensure a personal and meaningful experience.
HTHT chat has the following features:
- Listing of current topics being discussed
- Multiple live chat rooms enabled by socket.io technology
- Ability to join a room without registration
- Automatic size limit of 5 people in each room to encourage focused discussion
HTHT chat is built with Facebook's React.js for blazing fast DOM re-rendering and socket.io web sockets.
Detailed stack:
- Node.js - JavaScript runtime server
- Express - node.js web app framework
- React - JavaScript framework
- PostgreSQL - database
- Sequelize - node.js ORM for PostgreSQL
- socket.io - web socket 2-way polling
- Webpack - module bundler for ES6 browser support
October 2016:
We were tasked to hack a real-time app that uses web socket technology and had roughly 3 days to complete it.
The HTHT chat concept had always lurked in my mind: a web app that instantly connects me with someone who is thinking about something that I'm also thinking about at the moment. During a particularly long streak of daily morning meditation (like 15 days or so), I started to notice the incongruence of thoughts that I had from day to day. One day I'd be feeling melancholic and asking existential questions and on a different day I'd find myself wondering about the surest way to preventing mid-life crisis, if it still exists in 2016. Surely someone else in the world is also entertaining these thoughts right now?
Building HTHT chat was very interesting for two reasons:
- Web socket is a specific tool that opens many doors in terms of feature possibilities
- It works surprisingly well with React.js
UPDATE March 2018:
After a bit of time, I revisited this project to do some refactoring and improve the app! 😄
- Convert ES5 -> ES6 with Webpack + Babel
- Use prop-types for React component validation
- Set up bullet-proof ESLint configuration for React projects (see
.eslintrc.js) - Add
OnlineStatusWidgetfeature to indicate which other humans are in a chatroom - Refactor component names and methods