The alternate project we choice is an extension of Lab 6. Lab 6 was a basic chatroom webapp that had multiple rooms and users. Our alternate final project consists of building a log in and register system, and a profile system on top of the already existing lab 6. This allows users to log in to their accounts and chat with other registered users on the platform. All of this is done over react and handlebars for frontend, express js for backend, bootstrap for styling and mongoDB for storage of data.
James Zhang 
Jason Chang 
Yishao Wang Demo: This Video
In the project directory, you can run:
npm install
nodemon server.js
- Routing profile for specific users
This was a challenging problem, but we managed to resolve this by adding a boolean called view that keeps track of which fetch we called to route to the profile page via the profile handler in server.js (this was the extra feature for our project). - Parsing and passing json objects
This took a while for us to understand because we had to manipulate json objects in some of our api calls and had to return it via the response as a json object. It took a while for us to understand that we need to call json on the returned response object in order to parse the body of the json. After understanding the problem we were able to successfully pass in. - Editing messages
This problem was also challenging but we managed to resolve it by storing the message id of the comment in the name tag of the element to be retrieved by our script function. - Updating and Extracting Info from MongoDB
This took a while to understand as well because we had to look up MongoDB documentation in order to utilize their functions and understand what arguments we need to pass in.