[JDEV] webclient project

[Dave Meador]

A pure http chat interface would be great, but is also a very difficult
problem.  Given that you *can* manage state by creating a session in PHP or
something similar, but the problem is notifying the client (browser in this
case) when a chat message arrives for the client and needs to be displayed.
To my knowledge, the only way to do this is to have a refresh-button that
will trigger an update to redisplay the page with the new information.  That
is ugly!  Or you might use a polling like mechanism where you constantly
redirect the web page for updates, which is even more kludgy and slow.

How were you planning on solving the client-notification problem?  I think
there needs to be a client-side process running that maintains a connection
to the sever... thus Java and Flash based solutions.

The need for a chat client on the HTTP port stems from the following issue:
Most companies block chat ports either deliberately or inadvertantly
depending on their IT policies.  Also, most companies have the HTTP port
open for whatever reason.  Since this port is more often than not open, it
is easier to utilize the already open port for a service rather than annoy
the IT guys to open the proper port usually to no avail.  So why not provide
a chat server that listens on port 80 and setup the client to connect to
chat.domain.tld:80 and to all your... and of course the nice thing about
having a Java client (or Flash or whatever) is that you can use it
(supposedly) on any browser that supports Java eliminating the need for a
chat client to be installed on the client machine.  Of course thats just my
opinion. </rant>

--Dave

----- Original Message -----
From: "Mike Shoyher" <mike at shoyher.com>
To: "Richard Dobson" <jdev at jabber.org>
Sent: Friday, January 03, 2003 8:20 AM
Subject: Re[2]: [JDEV] webclient project


> Hello Richard,
>
> Friday, January 03, 2003, 6:51:00 PM, you wrote:
>
> RD> Its probably better to help the existing projects rather than create a
whole
> RD> new one of your own, I think i saw a javascript one a while back that
looked
> RD> promising.
>
> All the clients I found so far aren't pure web, they use either flash or
> java to connect to the server. I had an intention to make a
> jabber-based web chat, but things look quite complicated to me.
>
> The major problem is our beloved statelessness of the HTTP. That means
> the web server must keep all sessions to the jabber server. I don't
> see a good way to do it using mod_perl.
>
> Probably it would make sense to invent special stateless transport for
> the jabber server. The jabber server keeps sessions anyway so we could
> unburden the client and provide a way for the client to send what it
> wants and fetch the whole backlog of waiting messages.
>
> --
> Best regards,
>  Mike                            mailto:mike at shoyher.com
>
>
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