Comments on: Ajaxian Featured Tutorial: Ajax for Chat

By: Ciuma

Ciuma — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 22:16:41 +0000

Well, nevermind about that bit. It just doesn’t work. When I click to add a message, nothing happens.

By: Ciuma

Ciuma — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 20:23:36 +0000

I don’t get it. It doesn’t work. But what is DB.php? There’s no such file.

By: bonsai

bonsai — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 10:44:31 +0000

You may want to have a look at our new website, which offers live advice via an AJAX chat. The site uses .NET 2.0 and the .NET AJAX extensions. The AJAX chat module is a custom module we implemented in-house.
http://www.youwereme.com
We also implemented Dashifen’s idea in order to decrease lag and bandwidth requirements especially for lengthy chat sessions.
If you don’t want to register, there’s a video on the home page, which briefly shows a live chat session.
@Rey: do you think our site is worth showing up on here as well? ;-)

By: Dashifen

Dashifen — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 15:22:31 +0000

I’ve done this, too. The biggest thing I have to add is if you’re working on something like this, make sure you don’t return the entire chat’s contents every time you return from the server. Instead, only show lines that the specific visitor hasn’t seen (use auto-incrementing ids or timestamps to figure this out). That way your transfer time remains roughly constant and you don’t have to worry about the chat getting laggy as the length of the chat increases.

By: Aburo

Aburo — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 15:17:03 +0000

Take advantage of Ajax server push. You can make a chat room in 21-line codes. More, it’s open source :)
http://www.zkoss.org/smalltalks/serverpush/

By: zeank

zeank — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 14:37:08 +0000

If you want to implement your own Jabber/XMPP based web application there’s also JSJaC which can be found at http://zeank.in-berlin.de/jsjac/

By: Rey Bango

Rey Bango — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 14:18:16 +0000

@Adam: When you finalize it, ping me and it may show up on here. reybango (a) gmail

By: Adam Nemeth

Adam Nemeth — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 14:07:18 +0000

I did a similiar project, although with Jabber/XMPP (“Google Talk”), so it does work for corporate environments, when jabber is the inner IM-system (openfire is so easy to setup! takes only minutes)

http://jabbermania.blogspot.com/2007/06/jsjabber-educational-client-in.html

It uses the Prototype Window Class.

I wanted to integrate it into horde webmail as a demo, but I didn’t have time yet – I just need to write an authentication module for the server (if I’d use ejabberd, it could be even in php, but I stick with openfire), and it’s done.

BTW, there’s long-living connections as an alternative to polling. Better for the server, not the human.