Introduction: The chat application is one of the most used applications on the mobile device. It allows multiple parties to exchange messages with one another, does not require any treatment to the messages they exchange, and can be inherently store-less architecture. This article elaborates on the development of such a mobile application on the Android platform.
Description: Mobile applications are increasingly becoming smarter with one of the two popular mobile platforms that have their own app stores and find universal appeal among their customers. The Android platform comes with support for Java programming and the tools associated with software development in this well-established language. The Android studio supports emulator mode running and debugging of the application that thoroughly vets the application just like it would be tested on a physical device. Modern Android development tools include Kotlin, Coroutines, Dagger-hilt, Architecture components, MVVM, Room, Coil and FireBase. The last one is a pre-packaged, open-source bundle of code called extensions to automate common development tasks.
The Firebase services that are required to be enabled in the Firebase console for our purpose include Phone Auth, Cloud Firestore, Realtime Database, Storage and Composite Indexes. The Android Architecture Components include the following: a Navigation Component that handles in-app navigation with a single Activity, LiveData which has data objects that notify views when the underlying database changes, ViewModel which stores UI-related data that isn't destroyed on UI changes, DataBinding that generates a binding class for each XML layout file present in that module and allows you to more easily write code that interacts with views and declaratively binds observable data to UI elements, WorkManager which is an API that makes it easy to schedule deferrable, asynchronous tasks that are expected to run even if the app exits or the device restarts and Room which is an Object Relational Mapping between SQLite object and POJO.
The Dependency injection is handled via Dagger-Hilt which incorporates Inversion of control via Dagger Dependency Injection and the Hilt-ViewModel which injects dependencies to ViewModel.
The Firebase extensions support cloud messaging for sending notification to client application, the Cloud Firestore for flexible, scalable, NoSQL cloud database to store and sync data, Cloud Storage for store and serving user-generated content and Authentication for creating account with mobile number.
The Kotlin serializer converts specific classes to and from the JSON.Runtime library with core serialization API and supports libraries with different serialization formats. Coil-Kt is used as an image loading library for Android backends by Kotlin Coroutines.
Please note that the application can be run with little or no store requirements and relying exclusively on a message broker and Paxos algorithm as described herein. The above technologies leverage the latest trends in mobile application development.
Conclusion: Creating a webchat application is easily done with pre-packaged extensions and native Android development tools and framework. The components just need to be selected and wired together. Sample Android application is included here.
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