Chat App...

[Steve Rokus]

How can I create a simple chat program that I could use on my homepage ?

My homepage is created with ASP and SQL Server so far.. and I would like to know what would be the best way to add chat functionality to my site.

Do you know of any good resource to guide me with that? thanks!

steve.

[Cakkie]

Well, you could two things

1) Use IRC
You can create a component that connects to an IRC server, joins a channel and all that. This involves using winsock, but you can have full functionality of the IRC server. This also brings the lowest overhead to both client and server, since the client will be notified by the winsock if any data has arrived.

2) Use SQL. Here you could store all the messages in a database. Then, the controls must check on specified intervals if there are any new records, which results in more roundtrips, hence more overhead for your server.

My advice? Go for the first one. Also, there are several chatbox application available for free.

Tom Cannaerts
[email protected]

Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the universe is winning -- Rich Cook