Abstract
There has been a tremendous improvement and growth in popularity of chat applications as a means of internet communication since inception because of its real-time and non real-time nature. Conventional chat applications need to be installed and configured before it can be used and beside they are platform dependent. These requirements comprise problems for users especially those using the application in public computers such as school libraries, computer labs, etc where most of the time the application is not installed or the users are not allowed to install such applications. Web-based Chat application is the solution to these problems since it does not require any downloading, installation or configuration and besides it is platform independent. This project implements a real time web-based chat application using open ource web application framework Ruby on Rails.