Design and Implementation of a Client-Server Model for Campus Office Chat Systems

Abstract

In today's business environment, many employees work remotely, and chat applications can be a critical tool for maintaining a sense of connection and community within a team. They can also help to ensure that everyone is on the same page, even when working from different locations. Chat applications help to increase efficiency by reducing the time and effort required to complete tasks. With quick and easy communication and collaboration, team members can work more effectively, reducing the risk of errors or misunderstandings. This project focuses on solving the problem of remote office communications by developing a campus office chat application for Realtime communication in Nigerian universities using the University of Benin as a case study. The client-server model chat system consists of three layers, presentation layer or client-side which is the front-end part of the application the user interacts with built with react.js a JavaScript frontend framework, the logic layer or server-side which contains the backend logic of the chat application built with Node.js a backend JavaScript Framework and, the data tier which stores several states of the user’s information and data. Firebase DB which is an unstructured database is used in this project. The application was tested using the npm local server and the test results show that the application works as expected, it was deployed using Heroku as a PaaS (Platform as a Service) so as to allow the application to be available over the internet.