On 26-12-2011 1:38, Trenatos wrote:
I've been tasked with putting together a new chat system for a
website.
My plan is to do this in CFML, probably deploying it behind Apache
with Tomcat.
I have tried looking at a few existing solutions, but all the free
ones have been broken, and the non-free ones are expensive.
So I'm looking into how to do it by myself.
Tonight is only brainstorming.
So, my plan is to start with looking into sessions, and how to pass
use AJAX with OpenBD to pass the updated messages.
A little clunky is fine, I can refine it over time.
Databases not need, we don't need to retain information long-term, so
keep only the last 20 messages in memory should work just fine.
Each message being upwords of 6000 characters, it'll be interesting
putting this together.
They also want custom functions, such as coloring of text between **,
*this text would be green, for example*
There is a current system in place on the old server, however, the
person who implemented it is no longer around and it's built in python
or something else that requires a server (Runs with its' own linux
daemon). And for whatever reason, it doesn't want to start up on the
new server.
I'm not in charge of moving to the new server, that job went to one of
the old techs (He has no idea how the daemon works either), and I'm in
charge of the whole thing after the move is done.
I know, I know, I'm rambling on here.
Anyway, yes, my idea is to implement a CFML/AJAX solution, which I've
been using for about 3 weeks or so now :)
Wish me luck, and if anyone has any advice I'd be more then willing to
take it.
Just a thought, if you would be working on top of Jetty, you might want
to consider looking into it's support for websockets/cometD (although
that would require a fair bit of java cfscripting), as that means you
don't need to poll the server, but rather you push out the new messages
from the server to the clients (well, if their browsers support the
websocket protocol it will be a real push, otherwise it's a as fast as a
push, but it actually uses long polling (or in netscape and firefox it
uses x-mixed-replace)). Or move away from coldfusion entirely and use
something like node.js and you will be up and running in a few hours :P
(either with comet technologies (see socket.io) or with long polling
(see chat.nodejs.org inc. source code) ) .
David Mulder
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