Web based text chat?

Question

I'd like to develop a near real time web based chat system. Any suggestions on how to implement this via jQuery, any gotchas to look out for, and what is this Comet thing I keep reading about?

Ideally, I'd like to support up to about 5,000 concurrent chatters.

Answer 1

Comet, also known as Ajax Push, is often refered as "Reverse AJAX". Instead of pulling the information from the server in regular intervals, the data is pushed from the server to the browser when it is needed. That requires an open connection, for which there are several implementations.

I recommend that you use APE. Here is a demo: http://www.ape-project.org/demos/1/ape-real-time-chat.html

• Advantage: It will be very responsive and real-time.
• Disadvantage: You need to setup the APE server on your webserver machine.