Ran across a pretty interesting chat service at Collab.nl

It’s a flash chat application geared in some way toward multi-user development. All I saw there was people chatting and having a good time. If you’ve got a mic and webcam you can go there and get your chat on.

This app kindof puts AJAX in perspective against something like Flash. At this time there’s really no way to do in javascript what Collab.nl does with Flash. Javascript would need streaming video libraries coded native to the os and a fast server component similar to the Flash Media Server.

Macromedia is in a really great position since lots of video content(like YouTube and GoogleVideo) is being distributed through Flash. In addition all of the rich-client apps that people are doing with AJAX can really be done better with the Flash platform. They’ll be prettier, they’ll work faster, and they’ll be able to be … umm … well … richer. I’m talking video and sound to go with your non-reloading AJAX form page.

So Flash seems to be the future. How can we release and extend it? We need to take the kernel of the Flash idea, build upon it, and explode it. Move as much machine code to the client as possible. That’s really what flash does. Integrate into the browser, the ability to download and run os-specific, optimized, multi-media code. Require the code to be signed and people can start building trust with developers of this new platform. Any ideas?

Well, I’ve just released the next version and the changes are numerous. It’s starting to even look like a real chatroom!

As the project gains capabilities it’s also become more complex. This is the first release where I merged a contributor’s code so I tried my hand at using diff and patch to do the job. Since I do my development on windows, I downloaded unxutils from sourceforge to do the job. Then after a little python scripting, I had a workable diff and patch system.

One feature I added to this version is the ability to see when the chatroom has some new conversation while the window is minimized. The way I do it is by using md4 hashes and checking if the hash changes since the last time the chat window had focus. I think this is a bit on the processor intensive side so I’m looking for a faster hash function to keep the client running fast.

I really appreciate all the feedback and I’m looking forward to comments on the new version. Oh yeah, it’s now an official free software project using the BSD license. Feel free to make changes and send me your diffs.

I’m continuing to work on Chatr, my AJAX/php chat system. The last couple of features I’ve worked on help usability and utility and will be included in 0.5 after I test it a bit more.

First, the system can now email the address of the adminstrator’s choice when someone comes in the room. For low volume sites, this can function like a chat pager if you set it to email to your cellphone. For high volumes sites, this could be annoying but fun all the same as you announce to those around you: “Somebody just entered my chat room!”

Second, most chat and IM software have a way to notify you if a new message has been posted while the window is minimized. You might hear a sound or see the taskbar icon flash. I’ve updated the javascript client so now you’ll see “***” in the taskbar icon(and titlebar) if someone speaks, joins, or time’s out.

Finally, 0.4 brought an idling mode on the javascript client that helped to reduce server load by reducing the number of requests the client would make after 2 mins of no posting. I’ve changed that so now, the client comes out of idle as soon as they start typing. It just makes for more responsive chat.

I’m getting a lot of great suggestions from people who are trying out the chat. In this case, eating my own dog food is a blast!

I released 0.4 of Chatr, my AJAX/php chat software today. It getting fairly usable and I think any site that’s interested in having their users meet spontaneously, might want to give it a try.

The challenges I tackled in this version had to do with the nature of AJAX and its usually event-based operation. If someone leaves my chat room, it’s because they generally go to another page or close their browser. Both of these operations are quick and provide the javascript client zero time to say, “Hey! We’re exiting.”. I know Blogger does ask if you’re sure you want to leave so maybe I should take a look at their code. Anyway, at this point, the user is there and then he isn’t.

That means I have to keep track of pings to know that the user is still at the chat room. I ran into one problem where pings would stop coming in IE thereby leading to people being timed out but still looking at the room and requesting chat text as much as an active user. This “spectator” mode was not desirable so with this version I fixed it, those timed-out users now see an error message and their client recieves a message in the process to halt requests.

You can give it a try, download it or check out the readme.

I was so impressed with Kevin Mesiab’s Chat-o-licious that I decided to rewrite the server in php. At the time of this writing it can post, add users, and track pings. Stay tuned for an update on a live demo.

Update (7:39pm 12-21-05): Here’s the beta(now the latest version).