Building a messaging app
It's difficult to talk about tooling used to deploy React applications without any context. For this, you'll throw together a basic messaging app. In this section, you'll see how the app works and how it is built. Then, you'll be ready for the remaining chapter sections where you'll learn how to deploy your application as a set of containers.
The basic idea of this app is to be able to login and send messages to your contacts, as well as receiving messages. We'll keep it super simple. In terms of functionality, it'll barely match SMS capabilities. In fact, that can be the app title—Barely SMS. The idea is to have a React application with enough moving parts to test out in a production setting, as well as a server that you'll be able to deploy in a container later on.
For visual appearance, we'll use the Material-UI (https://material-ui-next.com/) component library. However, the choice of UI components should not affect the lessons of this chapter.
