chatly: A JavaScript repository from kamalaknn

About this project

This project was bootstrapped with Create React App. This project is build with React and Redux.

This app is study experiment to clone whatsapp web.
This app allows sending messages with a single profile. It is now not possible to switch profiles.
A list of friends is is hardcoded into it.
An initial conversation is stored in conversations.json
On the very first load, the conversations are fetched from conversations.json to simulate a network roundtrip.
Subsequent messaging is a websocket echo with https://www.websocket.org/echo.html.
This allows visualising messages sent. However, to simulate messages received, a utility function pushes random messages to messaging pipeline periodically.

The app is available at https://kamalaknn.github.io/chatly/.
To run the app locally, clone and npm install or yarn and run npm start.
The app was developed and tested extensively in chrome. However it should work fine on latest browsers.
The app is not yet optimised for mobile or small screen experiences.

The Enable Notifications button on the left pane, controls desktop notifications pushed from app.
You can use it toggle notification preference.
Messages received from the pipeline will be pushed as a notification.

As mentioned above, the initial conversation is fetched over the network on the very first visit.
As the app, sends and receives messages, it pushes to the browsers localStorage. This allows the app to load initial conversation when offline, and preserve state over reloads, without having an actual persistance server.
If the user goes offline, while using the app, a banner is shown, indicating offline status.
To allow, loading the app when a user is offline, a service-worker caches client assets. User can view and read existing conversations when offline.

All commits to master are continuosly deployed to gh-pages where the app is hosted.