A chat application made with React, NodeJS and websockets.
React is a front end framework used to make interactive user interfaces. Our product involves frequent UI updates and React is designed to efficiently update the relevant components as data is received.
The React Hooks useEffect and useRef are useful for tying the component lifecycle to websocket events too.
NodeJS was chosen because it allows us to use one language for our clinet and server code.
Socket.IO is a library that enables real-time, bidirectional and event-based communication between the browser and the server, which makes it perfect for a web chat application such as ours.
The front end is deployed with Netlify and the backend with Heroku.