Real-time systems and messaging platforms have become essential to our daily routines, enabling instantaneous user communication. From text messages and emails to group chats in Microsoft Teams, Slack, or WhatsApp, to maintain constant communication with friends and colleagues. These chat apps are integrated into almost every modern real-time application due to their immediate response times and extensive capabilities.
The increasing reliance on chat applications is due to their numerous benefits. For example, they allow faster decision-making, improved collaboration, and enhanced productivity. Moreover, chat platforms record all conversations, making tracking progress easier and referring to previous discussions. Additionally, these apps are becoming more sophisticated, incorporating features like video and voice calls, and screen & file sharing. Overall, chat applications have become indispensable tools for modern communication and collaboration.
Web Chat Free Demo
Try PubNub's Chat SDK web chat demo, showcasing features like message threads, reactions, quoting, read receipts, unread notifications, user presence, typing indicators, user invites, @mentions, and #channel references. Check out the code repo on GitHub
Why Build a Simple Web-Based Chat Application
There is a high demand for new and innovative chat software that cater to specific needs.
Web-based chat applications can be customized to suit different industries and businesses, providing a unique platform for users to communicate and collaborate. For example, a chat application designed for healthcare professionals can incorporate specific features such as secure messaging (HIPAA Compliant) and video consultations, making it more efficient and effective for medical practitioners.
Building a chat application can also provide lucrative business opportunities, potentially generating revenue through advertisements, subscriptions, and in-app purchases. Furthermore, as technology advances, the possibilities for chat applications are endless, with the potential to incorporate cutting-edge features such as artificial intelligence and virtual reality.
Benefits of a simple web-based chat application
Many benefits can come from building a simple web-based chat application. Simply, a chat application makes it easy to communicate with people anywhere in the world by sending and receiving messages. With a web chat application, users can receive the same engaging and lively interactions through custom messaging features, just as they would in person. This also allows users to converse on your platform instead of looking elsewhere for a messaging solution. Whether it's private chat, group chat, or large-scale chat, adding personalized chat features to your app can help ensure your users have a memorable experience.
A web-based chat application can offer convenience that other forms of communication cannot. Users can access the application from anywhere with an internet connection, making it easy to stay connected on the go. Furthermore, web-based chat applications can be designed to work seamlessly with other applications, allowing users to switch between different tools and functions without interrupting their conversations.
Build vs Buy a simple web-based chat application
The decision of whether to develop an in-house chat solution or opt for a vendor-provided solution is a significant one. For some organizations, the availability of developers in-house or on retainer at a contracting firm may make the prospect of developing and owning a fully customized chat or messaging solution appealing. Alternatively, purchasing an existing chat solution with an as-a-service pricing model can offer numerous advantages, but it also comes with challenges. However, a plug-and-play chat provider is a third option for adding chat functionality to a software product. This option may suffice for specific applications, as it offers UI features that fit all sizes and simplified back-end integrations.
Before committing to either build or buy chat functionality, it’s essential to consider your business’s core value proposition, appropriately prioritizing chat relative to the main problems you intend to solve for your customers. Although it provides prosperous benefits, it is rarely a critical business differentiator.
Before choosing, consider your business’s core value and prioritize accordingly. Building chat from scratch can be as resource-intensive as creating a new digital product, so focusing on core features often makes more sense.
To achieve a fully customizable chat solution that can be easily integrated into any web application while saving on cost and time, pick Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). This cloud model lets you rent computing resources (servers, storage & networking) on a pay-as-you-go basis, avoiding upfront infrastructure costs and allowing quick scaling based on your needs.
Web-Based Chat Application Features
Building a real-time chat application requires careful planning to ensure it meets desired functionality and user experience. Here are key considerations for creating a chat app from scratch or using an IaaS service.
Real-time Messaging Features
Modern chat applications go beyond simple messaging, offering features like message reactions, stickers, emojis, GIFs, voice and video calls for a more interactive experience. Additional functionalities such as active user identification, push notifications, and message history enhance immediacy and engagement. Presence features, which show when friends or collaborators are online, are crucial for retaining users on your web app instead of losing them to other platforms.
User Authentication and Authorization System
With today’s technology, simple chat applications tend to have a more advanced authentication system due to the number of chats that can be created. Whether it is a public chat room, group chat, or 1-1 chat, there are restrictions on who has access to specific conversations allowing your users to see particular messages.
If you are considering building a chat from scratch and using technologies such as Socket.IO there will have to be a level of channel architecture applied on top of the communication layer. Channels would be isolated for data transmission for each chat of every type. Only authenticated users or users that created the channel/chat could access and invite people to the current channel.
The second layer of protection is identity authentication achieved by a dynamic token authentication system such as JSON Web Tokens (JWT). A token is a short-lived access key, which is generated by the app’s backend server and allows users to access channels they have been invited or have access to. Logic in the backend server would have to be implemented to parse the token into channel-identifiable objects specifying which channels the users can publish (send a message) to or subscribe to (read messages from).
Encryption is another security layer that can be applied on top of the data transmission and data storage layer. This depends on the transmission protocol; you can implement Transport Layer Security (TLS) or Web Socket Secure (WSS) to achieve the functionality to run a private chat in your web application.
Using an IaaS service such as PubNub, it is built using channel separation architecture and offers an Access Manager that includes configurations for identity authentication so all messages and channels are protected and, when configured, will be up to the user discretion on what type of chat they would like to create.
Scalability of your Real-Time Chat Application
When designing a web-based chat application from scratch, scalability should be a top consideration to ensure the chat can handle a growing user base and increased traffic.
The backend architecture should be designed to handle many concurrent users and messages. A scalable architecture may use a distributed database, load balancers, and caching mechanisms to manage high traffic and improve performance. As the number of users and messages grows, the storage requirements will also increase. Choosing a database system that can handle large volumes of data and can be easily scaled up as needed is essential.
How to build a simple web-based chat software
To build the client side of your web app, download an integrated development environment (IDE) such as Visual Studio Code and choose a framework, or use HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Frameworks for web apps include React or Angular, which integrate more advanced state management techniques to make development easier.
Once you’ve downloaded the latest version of Visual Studio Code, create a project by creating .html, .css and .js files in the project directory. Usually, the core files to any vanilla javascript project are named app.js, index.html, and main.css. If you copy the absolute path of the index.html file and paste it into your browser, your code will now display and run. For a more detailed setup of a Vanilla JavaScript project, check out the Visual Studio Code tutorial. Using a framework, you can follow a tutorial for getting started with React or Angular.
Now we must choose the server-side language and hosting service we plan to use to handle network communications. For example, let's create our first web server using Node.js. Once we have installed Node.js, we want to create a Node.js project using the command “npm init” from our terminal. After creating a new project, we can open it using Visual Studio Code and follow the Node.js getting started guide for hosting a server locally.
We will want our front-end infrastructure to communicate over a WebSocket protocol with our server so we can communicate in real-time between two client applications. In this case, we must familiarize ourselves with implementing and understanding WebSocket terminology inside Node.js. Install a WebSocket library, ws for WebSocket implementation, express for creating a simple HTTP server, and nodemon to track changes in our backend code and restart the server. With this setup, we can now implement the logic of creating a simple web-based chat application.
For more information on implementing WebSockets in node.js, check out our Node.js WebSocket Programming Examples.
Implementing WebSocket functionality is possible with various libraries, but PubNub offers significant advantages. It provides a fully-managed infrastructure for real-time communication, eliminating the need to set up and manage your own WebSocket servers. Using PubNub server-side services saves time and effort, especially if you're not well-versed in WebSocket implementation.
Simple web-based chat application examples
Web-based chat applications like Messenger, Microsoft Teams, or Slack implement custom chat applications to create unique user experiences. However, with PubNub, companies don’t have to set up and scale the infrastructure.
A fully-featured chat application written in TypeScript using the NextJS and Tailwind frameworks. Shows how to implement message threads, message reactions, quoting messages, read receipts, unread messages notifications, user presence, typing indicators, inviting users to channels, and the ability to @mention users & to #reference channels. The code repository is available on GitHub
A simple web-based group chat application using the Javascript SDK that allows you to send messages over PubNub in real-time. This repository is written using PubNub messaging and was achieved in only ten lines of code (excluding styling). You can also download the code repository from our GitHub.
Getting started with PubNub for your web-based chat application
PubNub is an IaaS service that can achieve a fully customizable chat solution using one of our SDKs that can be integrated into your web application quickly and cost-effectively. You can leverage PubNub to build real-time messaging features into their application. Ultimately, this strategy can help companies to save time and money while delivering a high-quality chat solution to their customers.
PubNub has the following features built-in into its API and can meet the specific needs of your applications.
Publish: Send messages whenever user input is updated, such as text updates, emoji reactions, sent files, and other complex metadata.
Subscribe: Receive new messages to refresh users' screens.
Presence: Update and detect the online status of users.
Message Persistence: Display any received messages once users login to the app or track project and document revisions.
Mobile Push Notifications: Notify mobile users who are away from the app about any chat messages, project updates, or application updates.
App Context: Store information about your user in one place without setting up or calling your database.
Access Manager: Restrict access for private conversations, channel rooms, documents, and projects for specific users.
Functions: Translate messages, censor inappropriate messages, announce the arrival of new users, and notify other users of mentions.
Events & Actions: Centrally manage events in your application’s ecosystem and trigger business logic without code.
To begin using PubNub to power your web-based real-time chat app, you must first create a PubNub account and download PubNub’s JavaScript SDK. The SDK integrates seamlessly into your application and allows you to connect to PubNub’s real-time communication platform.
Sign in or create an account to create an app on the Admin Portal and get the keys to use in your application. Learn how to do so by following this how-to on creating keys.
Download the JavaScript SDK by following the instructions in the documentation to install any necessary PubNub dependencies for your messaging app.
Follow the SDKs getting started documentation to configure a PubNub object to begin publishing and subscribing to channels.
