[TomUK]

Hey all,
I am the guy who originally wrote bbmessenger with Carl, as Carl will confirm.

bbmessenger was originally for Carl's site, but during development Carl decided it would be nice to release it to the community, so we took on the comprimise of running it via continutally polling mySQL to make up for the lack of widespread PHP process communication systems. This comprimise, however processor heavy, let it run on shared hosts. The combination of javascript, problems with proxies, and this troubled me. You cannot do multi user chat via these methods.

We then set about to modify an open source Jabber(tm) server to authenticate off vBulletin, which I seem to remember was a PHP file and about 100 lines of extra C to the core jabber server. I think there are screenshots of a client further back in this thread running off this setup, with username boardusername@domainname.com which Carl posted. This solved the problems of connections, proxies, etc. but required the user to download a client. I am aware there are bbmessenger type clients for Jabber, but they are also processor intensive. Running a jabber server requires a shell account where you can set the server going and forget about it.

I like this solution, but I would like to propose another:

I am currently considering rewriting bbmessenger, this time as a Java client and server pair. This would need you to run a server process on your hosting or shell account. The client would be more compatible than the javascript version, as Java is a lot more standardised than javascript (no DOM/IE/layers problems). Java is not HTML, so the possibilities for changing the style are limited without digging into source code, but it is possible to allow for changing colours and images. I can see this realistically taking two to three months to do, as I am a very busy guy, but I can see the rewards being great, I am thinking group chat etc.

any... comments?