Full Project – Development of a chat app

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CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY

Communication is a means for people to exchange messages. It has started since the beginning of human creation. Distant communication began as early as the 1800 century with the introduction of television, telegraph, and then telephony. Interestingly enough, telephone communication stands out as the fastest-growing technology, from fixed line to mobile wireless, from a voice call to data transfer. The emergence of computer networks and telecommunication technologies bears the same objective which is to allow people to communicate.

Nowadays, communication technologies have been rapidly and radically transform in lifeand work. The changes given by communication technologies will always have an enormous impact on every aspect of life, especially on how people interact to each other. That condition andsituation have changed the life style of the people in any level. Firkhanet.al. (2016).

In the past, the people had communicated inefficiently and ineffectively, especially for the disabledpeople. In contrary, all the people presently almost have no obstacles to communicate with each other.There have been many sophisticated communication tools that provide many functions and services.Mobile phone, for instance, it is the most common device that has been used for most of the people onearth. Short Message Service (SMS) is one of the most well-known services provided in the mobilephone. This service is the most widely used data application on the planet, with 2.4 billion active usersor 74% of all mobile phone subscribers sending and receiving text messages on their phones. Firkhan et.al. (2016).

All this while, much efforts has been drawn towards consolidating the device into one and therefore indiscriminate the services. The principle of communication can generally be categorized into two, client-server and peep-to-peer (Daswani et al., 2013), Eberspächer Schollmeier, (2015). In client-server environment, there is a dedicated server while the rest of other nodes are acting as clients throughout the whole communication. Whereby, in peerto-peer environment, a node can be either a client or a server depending whether it is a requestor or provider of the service at that specific time. Client-server technology has been around for some times. Some examples of client-server applications are web access, network time and windows login. Specific to user login, user’s credentials are stored in the database at the server side. Anyone who has an access to the server and the database can easily access user information. This creates the idea of single point of failure which may cause a devastated damage in case of breaks in. Another downside of client-server is the resource consumption which always concentrates on the server side. This gives rise to the infrastructure cost for the provider. Chat application is becoming an important digital communication tools, people use it for business, education and socialize. It offers users an ability to identify online friends, a user then just selects the one that he/she wants to communicate before begins exchanging messages at will. Basic function of chat application is to be able to exchange a text-based message although today’s application is equipped with more advanced features such as audio, video conferencing to the least. The application can be developed based on either client-server or Peer-to-Peer (P2P) architectures. However, P2P now turned out to be the popular architecture as it offers many advantages such as low maintenance cost for server side (considering client-server scenario) and high availability content distribution system. For this reasons, many popular applications like Skype, BitTorent and eMule rely on P2P network.

The Chat Application Server functions by establishing a socket connection with the client system, confirming connections, and maintaining the Chat Handler. The Chat Handler is responsible for handling the interactions between the various clients and the server. The handler broadcasts messages to all the clients in a specific room, handles invitations to private rooms, creation of public rooms, and the state of the user list.

1.2 STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM

To keep pace with this fast-moving world, we need to be adaptable to changing circumstances. Communication is one of the mostimportant aspects of any business.And being able to develop these features is essential to growing a business. Having a good customer service team is essential toimproving business relationships with the customer. But it also helps to reach out to your clients where you are. Showing that youare also improving can be important to your customers. This feature indicates that you are willing to adjust to a variety of changesfor potential customers.

In addition, chat apps allow employees to interact and work together. Teams of employees can share ideas and solve companyproblems with a single click. At a time when people are sitting at computers all day, it makes sense that conversations take placethere. The chat app works very well in email communication. And the main goal of a chat request is cooperation. This means that itsintegration can lead to better employee performance and productivity

An establishment has only proven to be a problem as highlighted below

Private organizations aim at having separate chat system to communicate with people and to share resources securely to them.
Sharing resources through other public applications are not much reliable and secure.
There are several restrictions in public applications.
Public applications are easily affected by network threats, etc.
This application extends one-way messaging to multi way communication

1.3 AIM AND OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY

The aim of this project is to design a web based chat application.

The objectives are as follow:

Using a private network chat system or organizations.
Ensuring the security of message and confidential data to be shared over the network.

Keeping data confidential in a secure way.

Creating a two-way communication system.
Allow both group chat and private chat.
To allow for easier and faster communication between people.

Ensure unlimited data transfer without any size limit.
Making people connect with others anytime, anywhere.

1.4 SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY

This study seeks to design instant communication functionality between users. The most important part of building a good chat application is focus on the data flow on web. This project spends a good amount of research to find the most appropriate technology to deliver the data flow, which is HTML, JavaScript and CSS for the client-side while PHP was used for the server-side, MySQL was used for the database The users have the capability to do one to one communication and group communications. And the users can receive messages instantly while online and still be able to see the messages sent while they are offline. The client-side application can be hosted on any machine with WAMP server. The chat helps to achieve a greater degree of responsiveness among stakeholders in the web based chat application system – students, lecturers and system administrators – enabling them collaborate effectively to enhance studies and also result-related complaints.

1.5 SCOPE AND DELIMITATION OF THE STUDY

In the course of this project research, I shall take into account the consideration that all development and analysis regarding the project will be centred on intranet/internet standards and technology.

In full, the scope of the work is outlined thus:

The solution, as conceived and developed in this study, will focus on web based chat application only;
The questions delivered by the solution will be of two formats, viz, instant chat services (asynchronously) and asynchronous transfer of data.

The study is limited to the above due to:

Limited access to required related materials for consultation.
The time-critical nature of the study informs my use of prototype-based RAD to develop the proposed solution.

1.6 DEFINITION OF TERMS

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