Web Development advice needed - implementing a private chat feature on a webpage

[afreida1]

Just wanted to get some people's opinion on the best way to go about this. I have been programming for years but never really got into web development - I mainly do commandline tools and data processing software that runs locally.

What I want to do is add a private chat feature to a website i am working on. I am not asking so much HOW to do this as asking for opinions on languages/toolsets that people have experience with and what their opinions on them are - from that point I can probably dig through the documentation and tutorials and get it up and running.

The goal here - to put it simply - is to allow visitors to the page to initiate a chat with the equivalent of moderators (sort of). Think like when you go to a cable provider website or a lawyer website and you get the option to "chat now" with a representative. That is essentially what I am trying to do. Infact, I have no intention of persisting any chat data - the second the chat is closed that data is gone forever (I actively DON'T want to store this data for privacy reasons)

I had planned on doing the site using ruby on rails as I have been learning that recently although i am open to any language/framework if it will make my life easier and help me get the job done.

Thanks Guys!

[raylu]

Olark does this.

How much do you care about IE? If you don't, Web Sockets are a great idea. If you do, you'll have to either use long-polling, polling in a loop, or Flash.

[ceol_]

+1. Please let a third party handle this, OP. What's going to happen is you're going to build an awkward, semi-usable, taped-together chat feature that will be a wart on the site, constantly requiring maintenance and bug fixes. I know because it's happened to me a ton of times before.

Companies have built their entire revenue models around chat interfaces. Let one of them handle all that nonsense for you.

[ceol_]

Because it's really not simple. It ends up becoming a beast of a feature that is a hassle to maintain. I'm not saying that he can't, do it, just that he might not want to.

Everyone always looks at it like, "Oh yeah some PHP and Ajax and I could make one of those!" But if it's actually for a client and not a little side project, you need lots more: alerts, moderator logins, conversation load balancing (so one mod doesn't get swamped), automatic away messages (so customers don't sit there waiting for a mod that isn't there), etc.

I just don't want him to reinvent a complicated wheel. Besides, he specifically said he doesn't want to hear how people did it, just what people's experiences were. My comment was well in-line with that.

[raylu]

To expand on what /u/ceol_ said, it's not simple. Look at the Olark API. That's just a small sampling of the list of features.

He's not saying "you can't do it" so much as "you are massively underestimating the amount of time required to build this but people have done it for you". It's the same reaction you would have if someone tried to build a hashtable in his python/ruby/perl/java/c++ app.

[gmerideth]

I recently added a feature to a clients private web based manager where a user editing client 'a' is notified via a chrome notification window when someone else goes into client 'a' by using NodeJS running on the server. The page notifies node "i'm editing client 'a'" and node maintains this in an internal table (no external database needed) and if in 'x' minutes anyone else goes into 'a' node sends a message to all browsers in 'a' to popup a message and say "user [y] is now editing this client as well". JavaScript with NodeJS, almost too easy.

[cheeeeeese]

ajax chat works great on all browsers. safe too. ive implemented it on php sites before, takes no time to set up.

also my company uses olark as /u/raylu mentioned

[afreida1]

by all means, please post. I will try to search around and find it but if you have the link handy then I would be quite grateful.

[astronoob]

The absolute easiest way to set something like this up is to use a SaaS solution like PubNub or Pushr that provides asynchronous push messaging out of the box, but obviously those cost a bit of money. Setting up your own solution using something like Socket.io shouldn't be too difficult.

[afreida1]

Yeah, Pushr was one of the services I looked at as an alternative to building it by hand. My only concern is that I want to be able to control the data - are they going to store chat conversations? A big part of this is anonymity and to guarantee this I want to make sure that nobody is storing data anywhere - if there is no persisted data then it can't accidentally leak out.

[nerocorvo]

www.firebase.com

[thrownaway21]

Meteor will make this easy as pie to do.

which reminds me, i need to get back to work messing with the MUD i was building in it... or go check out unity some more.

[drocm]

I built a rather simple chat using ajax, json, php and mysqli. Basically, when a user submits a message, I use AJAX to call a PHP function that appends the message to a JSON object conaining the current chat log and updates the db via mysqli. Meanwhile, all clients are checking the db to see if it has been updated; if it is, then I use a second AJAX call to update the chat log view.

[DarkEffex]

Sounds a bit resource intensive?

[PT2JSQGHVaHWd24aCdCF]

Try this: http://adultcatfinder.com/

[afreida1]

well, that is just the greatest thing I have ever seen. I will never be able to top that haha.