🗨️ Chat App

My First Web Project

A simple, real-time chat application built as a learning project back in late 2021. It featured a basic user interface and real-time communication, with a design loosely inspired by WhatsApp.

🚀 Features

• 🔐 Basic Login Page
  Users could create a username and password to enter the app — no authentication or password protection was implemented.

• 💬 Single Chatroom
  All users joined the same global chatroom. There were no separate channels or rooms.

• 👥 User Presence

  • A sidebar on the left displayed when users joined or left.
  • Real-time tracking of how many users were currently online.

• 🧾 Chat Log UI

  • The chat window on the right displayed messages in a WhatsApp-style layout with alternating green and white message bubbles.
  • The window on the left showed users joining in and leaving the chatroom in realtime.
  • The join group functionality was never implemented. ❌

🛠️ Tech Stack

• Backend: Node.js + MongoDB
• Frontend: Plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

🧪 Planned (But Unfinished) Features

• 🔀 Ability to create and join multiple chatrooms
• 🌐 A vision to eventually become a basic clone of Discord

What I learned while building this project

• How do websockets work?
• How to do basic authentication using a backend?
• How to stores details in local storage of the browser (my version of cookies)?
• How to serve files using NodeJS?
• etc.