So I've done some research on developing a chat app with web2py. First, I took a look of: http://code.google.com/p/web2py/source/browse/gluon/contrib/comet_messaging.py, and then a related tutorial using it: http://vimeo.com/38972256 (not in english, so I might have missed a thing or two). What I can conclude from them is that we can make a chat application *using websockets*. However, since websockets is not supported by all the browsers except for Chrome (at least not by default for latest versions of other major browsers, and certainly not by their older versions), this solution has limited practical use.
Thanks to questions previously asked in the group, I found this: http://greg.thehellings.com/2011/05/web2py-websockets-and-socket-io-part-iii-socket-io/, which attempts to use Tornadio (https://github.com/MrJoes/tornadio) with Socket.io to circumvent the problem above, so that if websockets is not available some other fall-back option is used instead. However, this method stops working for new versions (0.7+) of Socket.io, even with the newer Tornadio2 (https://github.com/MrJoes/tornadio2). In fact, the author of the original blog post above eventually decided to abandon Socket.io approach altogether after an effort to make things work: https://github.com/mrjoes/tornadio2/issues/17. So, does this mean that we are running out options for implementing a practical chat application (which is probably one of the most typical example applications made with different web frameworks these days) using web2py? Apart from these websockets and its remedy Socket.io, is there any other protocol/library we can use with web2py to make this happens? Would love to hear your suggestions!
