Description MChat is a web chat application I created to gain some more experience in developing web applications and hosting them.

MChat is very similar to chat applications like Discord, and Facebook Messenger, you can add friends, create group chats, and privately message friends.

The application consists of three parts the React Application (The frontend), and the Express REST API (The backend), and the ASP. NET SignalR server. I used TailwindCSS to style the React Application, this allowed me to forgo having to write out CSS in a separate file and speed up development time. I opted to use Typescript instead of Javascript when developing the application to teach myself the language.

For the icons I used a mixture of font awesome, and my own custom svg icons, made using adobe illustrator and figma. I used microsoft’s signalr client npm package to implement realtime communication with my SignalR server.

I developed the REST API using the Express framework, and NodeJS. I implemented email verification using Mailgun, and its npm package. I dealt with Storing / Retrieving Images by using a S3 bucket on AWS, the react app requests the image from the REST API and the REST API simply redirects the request to images URL in the S3 bucket.

I used Firebase to host the React App, Heroku to host the REST API, and Microsoft Azure to host the SignalR server.