Programing a chat-page

[umekille78]

Hi all!Im trying to build a chat-page to put on my web-page. Its going to be a part of a community thing.Im going to do most of the work on the community with PHP and SQL becouse that is what Im best at.But i dont think that will work for a chat. Not very good anyway. Im trying to do the chat-page in a way that dosnt take to much cpu-power from the serwer.Do any of you have any ideas about what to use? PHP? CGI? JavaScript? Or some thing totaly diferent?I have several reasons why to build my own chat. One of the bigest is that it should run with the rest of the community in an interacting way. And its suposed to have some feature I have never seen on a ordenary chat-page.Im greatful for all ideas on the subject./Per

[boen_robot]

Wouldn't it be best if you could get an existing chating system and modify it's source code? As for what's the best way... well... perhaps a combination of PHP and JavaScript. CGI is not needed scince it does the work in the same way as PHP. You should use JavaScript for all the different features such as smilies, text manipulations, etc. I think that using AJAX based techniques (writing and outputing everything in/from an XML file) you can also make a true type of chat. One in which everyone tracks the lines directly, not as in a forum, where you have to refresh to see the new thing. However, in order to keep the file size small, you'll need a PHP script that will remove older lines at some point and doing so for every line is going to take some considerable amount of CPU power.The "safest" way to do this is JAVA (not JavaScript, but the OOP language from Sun Microsystems) embed as an object. However, I don't think that any person here is experienced with it, so it will be hard anyways.

[alleyCat]

Yes, using AJAX technology is perfect for developing chatting system on web. you can refer to it on this web page:http://www.dynamicajax.com/fr/AJAX_Driven_...71_290_291.htmlHope this helpsJane