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Poliglot is a MERN stack application which allows users to instant message eachother in any language!
It's able to translate messages in a chat to whatever language the user selects when creating an account. Meaning that one person can be writing English and the other writing French and both will be able to have a conversation with no hassle.
I built this app in my spare time over a week to get more familiar with React.js and API unit testing with Mocha and Chai.
The app uses Node, Express, Mongodb and Mongoose to build an API to handle the data for users, chats and messages. This is paired with a React front-end to consume this API. I am using the Random User Generator API to seed users into the database, so there should always be someone to chat to!
I use a library called socket.io which enables real-time communication meaning that users will recieve their incoming messages instantantly. Before this message is displayed to the user, the text will be sent through the google translate api converting it into whatever lanage the reciever has specified, Which will be saved to the API.
There is functionality to handle authentication, hashing passwords with bcrypt and JSON web tokens for passing current user data to the front-end in a secure way and restricting access to certain pages. And image uploading for profile picutres with Filestack.
I also use a variety of other packages as seen in the package.json.
The app is fully responsive to browsers and most phones however, I do indend on making a native version using React Native when I have time.
There are 56 unit tests covering majority of the API functionality. I'm using Istanbul for test coverage.
For those intrested in forking this repo.
// install dependencies
yarn install
// start API server
yarn start:server
// start client server
yarn start:client
// ensure mongodb is running
mongod
// run tests
yarn test
All other command scripts can be seen in the package.json.
There are still a bunch of features that I would like to add whenever I get some time.
- Add ability to delete a chat.
- Notify user when they recieve a new message.
- Show badge next to chat with how many unread messages they have
- Ability to alter the language of the entire app to meet the current user's preference.