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Online Web Chat Software?

Posted by Cliff on from the spider-talk-over-the-grapevine dept.

frooyo asks: "I have been looking for sometime now to add the functionality of web chat to my website. I have been having difficulty in finding free (open source) software that allows for a moderator and N number of registered users to chat on my website. These projects look promising, but we'd like to know what others are out there. What do you use on your website for web chatting?"

1 of 30 comments (clear)

  1. HTTP is just not a good chat protocol. by mellon · · Score: 3, Insightful

    HTTP is a really lousy transport for a bidirectional chat. It's really a question-and-response protocol, and things that speak it generally follow that way of doing things. So when you try to chat over HTTP, you wind up having to have some kind of timeout mechanism that refetches the web page every second in order to get decent interactivity, and it still provides a lousy user experience.

    I would recommend instead that you go with the Jabber protocol, which is a much better choice for chatting. Nice, friendly, free clients are available for all popular operating systems. If you really want it to look webbish, you can always use a java web app that speaks jabber. This should give you a much nicer user experience.