If you’re a software engineer ready to dive into your chat build, choose the technical guide that’s right for you from our library of more than 100 chat development tutorials.
Note: This guide doesn’t provide line-by-line coding instructions, in part because there are so many different ways to code a chat app depending on your use case, experience level, and specific requirements.
Hundreds if not thousands of code examples are available online for chat app projects of all types and sizes, but it can be difficult to determine whether a given approach will meet your needs without a great deal of time-consuming and costly trial and error. Once a product team or a startup founder has identified an opportunity to build a chat app, research into the best chat development processes can quickly return an overwhelming volume of information. Not every new chat app has to go head to head with WhatsApp, either - opportunities abound for specialized messaging applications that serve specific groups of users or support communication across industries as diverse as gaming, dating, and healthcare. The market for consumer chat applications is dominated by a handful of major players, but constantly evolving technologies and consumer needs create opportunities for new chat and messaging applications to gain market share. Chat’s asynchronous nature eliminates the urgency and pressure of a phone call, but it still feels faster, more immediate, and less formal than email. In many situations, users choose chat or instant messaging apps over other ways of contacting each other.
This simply creates a variable called logout with the value of true.Since the introduction of first-gen consumer messaging apps like AIM in the 1990s, chat has solidified its role as a mainstream method of communication. If the user confirms the exit, therefore deciding to end the session, then we send them to index.php?logout=true. The jQuery code above simply shows a confirmation alert if a user clicks the #exit link. The code below will be added to our style.css file. We will now add some CSS to make our chat application look better than with the default browser styling. We will load all of our code after the document is ready. Our second script tag is what we will be working on. We will first link to the Cloudflare jQuery CDN, as we will be using the jQuery library for this tutorial.
We are using flexbox instead of floating elements for the layout. The first will be a welcome to the user and will be on the left, and the second will be an exit link and will be on the right.