We are building a responsive chat room web application, initially developed for desktop but adaptable to mobile displays.
The main student feature is the chat room, where you can ask peer-to-peer questions, commentary, feedback, etc. Questions and replies can be moderated and upvoted by peers, with the highest voted questions being pushed to the professor for response. Anonymity is restricted in regards to professor-pushed communication, as full identification (including email address and display name) and we anticipate that this will limit crude language, etc.
The current model features a secure login/authentication system in addition to persistent data storage. Chalk Talk is now hosted on Heroku using cloud storage from mLab, which is a cloud database service that hosts MongoDB databases.
For frontend, we coded in HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Our UI will be built off of a Bootstrap framework, which streamlines the styling process and optimizes for responsive design. This is a must as our full app will be intended for both mobile and desktop users. Javascript interactions were designed using jQuery, which allows for quick and targeted DOM responses.
Our backend stack was built from Socket.io and Node.js. We implemented Javascript heavily in order to design an app which could respond quickly to a range of features. Fast updating and response times is imperative for the success of our real-time chat app.