Open Source Web Based Chat

[Gaurav Vaish]

Hi All,

I'm looking for an Open Source Web Based Chat Application, preferably in PHP (1st preference) or Java (2nd preference).

Any pointers will be great!

btw, just wondering if any of these will support XMPP connector at the other end (server)!

-Gaurav

[Debayan Banerjee]

2009/11/3 Gaurav Vaish <gaurav...@gmail.com>:

> Hi All,
>
> I'm looking for an Open Source Web Based Chat Application, preferably in PHP
> (1st preference) or Java (2nd preference).

Search Jabber+web on google.

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Regards,
Debayan Banerjee

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[Gaurav Vaish]

Hey Debayan,

Thanks for the pointers.

Any recommendations?

JWChat: Download page is down. :(
Web Jabber: It's applet. I'm looking for pure HTML+JS (using Ajax).
AjaxJabber: Looks good.

What'd be your reco's?


-Gaurav

--
Happy Hacking,
Gaurav Vaish
twitter.com/mastergaurav
www.mastergaurav.com

[Debayan Banerjee]

2009/11/3 Gaurav Vaish <gaurav...@gmail.com>:

>
> Hey Debayan,
>
> Thanks for the pointers.
>
> Any recommendations?

I have not tried any bro :P
But be sure to tell us how your experiment went.

[Gaurav Vaish]

He he! Sure.

ATM, I'm rejecting most of them just by looking at the feature-set, usage, platform, arch-design et al.
Usage-review comes much later.


-Gaurav

[Anirudh]

Gaurav,

Running a jabber server (most popular ones are the erlang based
ejabberd and my fav is lua based prosody), requires a dedicated server
with root privileges. If you're running a simple LAMP server and have
hosted space on it, then it's difficult to build chat servers.

The trouble is that you need to *push* the data to the users over
http, realtime, as the data is coming in to your server. This requires
keeping a http connection open persistantly, or by having the client
use XMLHttpRequests to poll your server repeatedly. Either way is very
difficult and unscalable.

The trouble with using php here, is that php's security settings
require any http request to time out quickly, so maintaining
persistent connections is hard, and your server will go down moment
you hit about 20 connections, because each process gets it's own
thread.

The thing you're looking for is a "comet" server, usually people go in
for xmpp and ejabberd, but figuring out how to configure them with
your http server frontend is going to be difficult - most people like
facebook, etc use homebrew, rpc based techniques.

In essence, you're better off getting a hosted chat widget (like the
one mibbit provides) rather than write one/use one on your own server.
Because chat isn't easy to implement and run.

Thanks,
Anirudh

--
Senior undergraduate student, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur.
http://anirudhsanjeev.org