Chat.io

A real-time instant one-to-one private chat web application using Java and Spring framework.

Demo Video

I created the back-end using these technologies:

• Spring Framework for dependency injection and inversion of control.
• Spring Boot as a starter to easily integrate dependencies like Spring web, testing, and DATA JPA.
• H2 in-memory database a light-weight db just to ease the development purpose.
• WebSocket for bidirectional messaging.
• Thymeleaf a template engine for rendering server side code on the client side.

While my main focus is on the back-end, I did the front-end using these technologies:

• HTML for page layout.
• CSS for some custom styling.
• JavaScript for controlling page behaviour and functionality.
• Bootstrap for some element components.
• SockJS as my web socket client to publish and subscribe to message topics.
• Font Awesome for adding some icons.

Current features:

• Sign-up and Login functionality with some basic JS validation.
• Chat box page for users to make private one-to-one communication.
• Find Contacts functionality with async searchable list to search for any user and start instant messaging with.
• My Contacts page for my current connected with users.
• Real-time messaging; so users can receive and send messages asynchronously in real-time.
• Update Profile Picture functionality to allow users to select a local image to change their profile picture.

Main Web Pages:

Main Page

Register Page

Login Page

Home, search input, suggested contacts Page

Searchable input result

Your contacts page

Chat box Page