DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF AN ONLINE/INTRANET OFFICE CHAT APPLICATION SYSTEM

1.1 Introduction

Online chat may refer to any kind of communication over the Internet that offers a real-time transmission of text messages from sender to receiver. Chat messages are generally short in order to enable other participants to respond quickly. Thereby, a feeling similar to a spoken conversation is created, which distinguishes chatting from other text-based online communication forms such as Internet forums and email. Online chat may address point-to-point communications as well as multicast communications from one sender to many receivers and voice and video chat, or may be a feature of a web conferencing service. Several network chat application systems are built to communicate with one another and are made available through service-oriented architectures. In this project, we use the client server architecture to develop a secured Client-Server chat application. A chat application is created based on Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) where TCP is connection oriented protocol and in the end, multithreading is used to develop the application.

As a prelude to other parts of this study, this chapter will discuss the background upon which this study was initiated, the statement of problems that led to this study, the Aim and Objectives of the study. Others are Significance of the study, Scope of work, Limitations of the Study and Definition of technical terms.

1.2 Background of Study

The Internet is the global system of interconnected computers together networks that use the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to link devices worldwide (Wikipedia, 2016). It is a network of networks that consists of private, public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope, linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless, and optical networking technologies (Wikipedia, 2016). An intranet is a network within an organization that is only accessible to systems in that organization. A file shared through this network is not available to the public but private to the network domain. The Chat Application Server functions by establishing a socket connection with the client system, confirming connections, and maintaining the Chat Handler. The Chat Handler is responsible for handling the interactions between the various clients and the server. The handler broadcasts messages to all the clients in a specific room, handles invitations to private rooms, creation of public rooms, and the state of the user list.

The origin of the Internet begins with the invention and discovery of digital computers in the 1950s. Initial phenomenon of packet networking originated in several computer science laboratories in the United States, United Kingdom, and France. (Kim, Byung-Keun 2005) The US Department of Defence awarded contracts as early as the 1960s for packet network systems, including the development of the ARPANET. The first message was sent over the ARPANET from computer science Professor Leonard Kleinrock’s laboratory at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) to the second network node at Stanford Research Institute (SRI).

Packet switching networks such as ARPANET, NPL network, CYCLADES, Merit Network, Tymnet, and Telenet, were developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s using a variety of communications protocols. Donald Davies first designed a packet-switched network at the National Physics Laboratory in the UK, which became a testbed for UK research for almost two decades. (Couldry, Nick 2012) The ARPANET project led to the development of protocols for internetworking, in which multiple separate networks could be joined into a network of networks.

Access to the ARPANET was expanded in 1981 when the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded the Computer Science Network (CSNET). In 1982, the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) was introduced as the standard networking protocol on the ARPANET. In the early 1980s the NSF funded the establishment for national supercomputing centers at several universities, and provided interconnectivity in 1986 with the NSFNET project, which also created network access to the supercomputer sites in the United States from research and education organizations. Commercial Internet service providers (ISPs) began to emerge in the very late 1980s. The ARPANET was decommissioned in 1990. Limited private connections to parts of the Internet by officially commercial entities emerged in several American cities by late 1989 and 1990, (Baran, Paul 1991) and the NSFNET was decommissioned in 1995, removing the last restrictions on the use of the Internet to carry commercial traffic.

In the 1980s, research at CERN in Switzerland by British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee resulted in the World Wide Web, linking hypertext documents into an information system, accessible from any node on the network. Since the mid-1990s, the Internet has had a revolutionary impact on culture, commerce, and technology, including the rise of near-instant communication by electronic mail, instant messaging, voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephone calls, two-way interactive video calls, and the World Wide Web with its discussion forums, blogs, social networking, and online shopping sites. The research and education community continues to develop and use advanced networks such as NSF’s very high speed Backbone Network Service (vBNS), Internet2, and National LambdaRail. Increasing amounts of data are transmitted at higher and higher speeds over fiber optic networks operating at 1-Gbit/s, 10-Gbit/s, or more. The Internet’s takeover of the global communication landscape was almost instant in historical terms: it only communicated 1% of the information flowing through two-way telecommunications networks in the year 1993, already 51% by 2000, and more than 97% of the telecommunicated information by 2007. Today the Internet continues to grow, driven by ever greater amounts of online information, commerce, entertainment, and social networking.

The first online chat system was called Talkomatic, created by Doug Brown and David R. Woolley in 1973 on the PLATO System at the University of Illinois. It offered several channels, each of which could accommodate up to five people, with messages appearing on all users’ screens character-by-character as they were typed. Talkomatic was very popular among PLATO users into the mid-1980s. In 2014, Brown and Woolley released a web-based version of Talkomatic.

Instant messaging (IM) is a type of online chat that offers real-time text transmission over the Internet. A LAN messenger operates in a similar way over a local area network. Short messages are typically transmitted bi-directionally between two parties, when each user chooses to complete a thought and select “send”. Some IM applications can use push technology to provide real-time text, which transmits messages character by character, as they are composed. More advanced instant messaging can add file transfer, clickable hyperlinks, Voice over IP, or video chat.

Non-IM types of chat include multicast transmission, usually referred to as “chat rooms”, where participants might be anonymous or might be previously known to each other (for example collaborators on a project that is using chat to facilitate communication). Instant messaging systems tend to facilitate connections between specified known users (often using a contact list also known as a “buddy list” or “friend list”). Depending on the IM protocol, the technical architecture can be peer-to-peer (direct point-to-point transmission) or client-server (an Instant message service center retransmits messages from the sender to the communication device). One the problems faced by instant messaging since its inception is its inability to instantly translate one language to another so that users speaking different language can easily communicate. It is on this background however that this research work was embarked on to design an Office Chat Application System.

1.3 Statement of the Problem

The major problems regarding the delivery of chat application system in Nigerian universities include:

1. Unable to access colleagues or ask questions freely without moving from ones desk;
2. Group work cannot be done independently with intermediate synchronous response from all members in the group in one location
3. Slow message delivery to all client on the system;
4. File transfer has never been possible using a private and more secure way.
5. Message broadcast within split of second has always been a challenge

1.4 Aim and Objectives of the Study

The aim of the study is to Design and Implement a web based chat application that will allow users within an intranet / internet connection to engage in private and public conversations. In achieving this aim, the following specific objectives were laid out as follows:

1. To design an Office Chat Application System;
2. To develop a conceptual design for a secure, accessible and user-friendly web based chat application for a university, using the University of Calabar, UNICAL, as case study;
3. To develop a system that will demonstrate its functionality, using the WAMP (cross-browser Apache/MySQL/PHP) web server framework;
4. To perform tests on the said system to assure functionality, accessibility and usability of the system;
5. To evaluate the existing literature of instant messaging and access the already made Office Chat Application System and improve on their deficiencies.

1.5 Significance of the Study

Justification for engaging in this study can be drawn from the following reasons:

1. The need to demonstrate the effectiveness of employing mobile driven information systems as a viable complement to systems based on the regular Web, within the university information framework; and
2. The need to achieve a greater degree of responsiveness among stakeholders in the web based chat application system – students, lecturers and system administrators – enabling them collaborate effectively to enhance studies and also result-related complaints.

1.6 Scope of the study

This research work is limited to the Design and Implementation of an Online / Intranet Office Chat Application System.

In the course of realizing this project, I shall take into account the consideration that all development and analysis regarding the project will be centered on intranet / internet standards and technology.

In full, the scope of the work is outlined thus:

1. The solution, as conceived and developed in this study, will focus on web based chat application only;
2. The questions delivered by the solution will be of two formats, viz, instant chat services (asynchronously) and asynchronous transfer of data;
3. As conceived, the solution shall comprise of the following modules:
4. A web-based chat application for lecturers, studentsand other academic staff through which students can chat and interact base on school assignment and share ideas from the comfort on their doom or hostel and can as well interact regarding result-related issues;
5. A back-end application, to be used by lecturers and administrators, for the management of essential information for the system, such as user violations and complaints’ lay by student,

• User authentication modules, which will employ unique modes of authentication to uniquely identify users, and maintain user state within the application.

1.7 Limitation of the Study

During the course of this study, many things militated against its completion, some of which are:

1. Time Constraint: The time frame given to accomplish this project was very short due to school academic calendar and it was carried out under pressure which made the researcher not to implement some necessary features.
2. Research material: availability of research material is a major setback to the scope of the study.
3. Frequent power failure: This made the researcher append more money on fuel to ensure sustainable power.
4. Financial Constraint: Insufficient fund tends to impede the efficiency of the researcher in sourcing for the relevant materials, literature or information and in the process of data collection (internet).

1.8 Definition of Terms

Beta testing: Testing carried out on software independent of its manufacturer by external users

Internet application: A Web site with dynamic, i.e. data-source oriented user-specific, content, which usually requires some form of user authentication.

Mobile device: Any device with the functionality for information management and transfer free from spatial and temporal constraints. Such devices include mobile phones, smart phones, PDAs (personal digital assistants), tablets and readers, among Others.

Mobile Web: The Internet, as accessible to mobile devices and computer system

RAD: rapid application development, a style of programming in which emphasis is placed on speed and delivery, usually employing extensive use of IDE (integrated development environment) capability.

UML: Unified Modeling Language, the international standard for specifying, visualizing, constructing and documenting the artifacts of software systems.

User authentication: the process within the context of an Internet application wherein eligible users are granted clearance to enter – and use – the application;

Online result system: It is web based software, that can process course registration and output results to the user.