How We Developed a Web Chat For Real-Time Communication

Web chats are beneficial for all types of businesses. Keep reading to learn how they can be helpful for you and how we can develop one specifically suited to the needs of your business.

Project idea

It all started with a dream. A dream about projects that can be assembled like LEGOs from ready-made components. Such a development model would make it possible to achieve the desired result more efficiently, both from our side as developers and from the clients’ side too.

We asked ourselves: what do our projects have in common? Having analyzed the requests from our clients over the past three years, we found out that the majority of them wanted to implement a chat client into their product.

Coming up with a new solution for each project is not an insurmountable challenge, but it’s rather costly and time-consuming. That’s why we decided to create our own chat room with basic functions, which can be further fine-tuned according to each client’s specific requests.

The problems of other solutions on the market are the following:

• high tariffs
• due to the poor documentation, you have to spend time clarifying and supplementing it
• extra features that are not in demand

Thus, the goal for our product was to reduce the time for evaluating the client’s project, since most of it is already ready in the form of pre-written component modules.

The Solution

We have created a chat plugin for real-time communication. It helps to enhance communications:

• Among team members, potentially serving as a corporate messenger.
• With users of the product. Web chat stimulates user growth and engagement by transforming a website into a social platform where users interact with each other.
• For customer support.

Basic web chat features:

• Unlimited chat rooms with instant messaging
• User and chat room management via API (including authorization)
• Private and public chats
• Lists of chatroom members
• Typing indication
• Text messaging
• Message history
• Search by posts

Depending on how functionality will be implemented into the system, these functions can be done by an admin or a user. 

The structure of the web chat is a set of rooms for communication. You can set them up for different purposes. For example, you can group colleagues by their departments or by their tasks and projects. In this case, the employee does not need to have a separate account ― the user is invited through the API, which simplifies the use of the system.

Chat rooms are managed using the same technology. They can be created automatically for different scenarios. For instance, in the case of a web platform for online learning, a new chat room with participants is created at the start of a lesson. 

Furthermore, based on the basic version, we develop the chat according to the client’s request. Some clients want their app to transfer large files, others would like to have emojis included. We agree on such amendments according to the usual project development process for the customer.

The Benefits

The developed solution:

1. Reduces development time. One flexible solution helps to effectively solve many problems in support and improvement in the long term. In particular, it allows:

• deployment from anywhere: on the internal server of the project or on a third-party. It is also possible to split the app into several servers. 
• the provision of a service load that commensurates with the project
• updating copies with minimal effort

2. Reduces the cost of project maintenance. The chat license is included in the post-development support contract.
3. Provides safety and stability. No crutches and sudden conflicts in module logic.
4. Solves business problems. We can refine the web chat so that it is tailored to the specifics of your project.

If you want to develop a web chat for your business tasks, we are ready to help you.

Stack

PHP, NodeJS(NestJS), Socket.io, Redis, PostgreSQL