ChitChat - https://chitchat-157309.appspot.com

Get random topic, say what's on your mind and see what others say. Your have 1 minute. Go! This app is intended to be a template for quick-start project for hackathons.

Background

This project was build on order to experiment GAE (Google App Engine), it's serverless platform, and to learn Python.

This webapp is split into background-service which runs independently, and the frontend-service which only holds the pre-compiled html & js files of the webapp. Both services are auto-scaleable (by GAE) under pressure, each by it's own pressure.
The frontend is a SPA (Single Page Application) constructed as Jade, and compiled at compile-time into html. So when visitor hits the site, he gets immidiatly the compiled version, no server-side work needed.

Technologies used

• GAE (as PaaS)
  • Serves and auto-balances the frontend and backend
  • Datastore
  • Task Queues & Deferred (for async and background processing)
• Firebase
  • Auth (Facebook, Google and Anon authentication)
  • Realtime Database (for conversations)
  • Storage (for pictures)
• Python
  • Flask (for backend endpoints)
• Angular (with heavy customization, like lazy-loading views and components)
• Jade (easy and comfort way to build html)
• Gulp (for Jade and LESS compile-on-save)

Build

Get python packages:

pip install -r /path/to/requirements.txt

Get nodejs packages and start dev environment:

npm install
gulp dev

Create local file with Firebase secret key:

This key is used in order to use Firebase's REST API to manipulate the topics.

• Go to: 'https://console.firebase.google.com/project/[YOUR-PROJECT-ID]/settings/serviceaccounts/databasesecrets'
• Grab the 'Secrets' key
• Save it into a file at '[ChitChat folder]/backend/authkey-chitchat.txt'

Start GAE dev environment:

dev_appserver.py frontend/app.yaml backend/app.yaml