need help about chatting....

[niroshan]

hi,
I am trying do build a chat program. But I don’t know how to establish the two way conversation. In a sense php worked as request and responds style so what ever submit to the page that has the action it will display according, in the same browser.
But as far as chatting concern what ever type in the client program should display in the other clients brower.( simply two different locations).

How can I do that? What is the method I should follow? Please help.

Thank you,

niroshan

[matbennett]

I am no expert on this, but I did have a little look into it a while ago.

From what I can see there are two ways to go about this. The first (easy but a bit crap) is to have some form of refreshing going on. With each refresh you simply look to see if there are any new message to display. As I said... easy but a bit crap.

The other way is to use a socket server, which I think is probably what you are looking to do. It is apparently possible to write these in PHP, but definitely beyond me at this time.

Try taking a look at Unity (http://www.moock.org/unity/). I seem to remember that this was about the best for what I was looking to do at the time. I believe that there is a free version as well that is scaled down, but should be fine for chat.

Hope that this is some help.

[niroshan]

hi ,
thank you very much for replying. i went to the site you have sent me. but the chat program, it`s not written in php. but thank you very much again. i really appreciate your help.

regards,

niroshan

[matbennett]

If I remember rightly (it's a while since I looked at this), the demo they have runs PHP & Flash together. This was also the approach that I took.

I believe that Unity is happy with anything XML based though.