Very cool. Great idea. I was thinking about this yesterday. Is that really how chat applications work on the web? With AJAX? There must be some other secret, because on sites like Facebook and Gmail, the response time is nearly instantaneous.

for this purpose there is "BOSH" - http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0124.html

BOSH is "Bidirectional-streams Over Synchronous HTTP", a technology for two-way communication over the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). BOSH emulates many of the transport primitives that are familiar from the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). For applications that require both "push" and "pull" communications, BOSH is significantly more bandwidth-efficient and responsive than most other bidirectional HTTP-based transport protocols and the techniques known as AJAX. BOSH achieves this efficiency and low latency by avoiding HTTP polling, yet it does so without resorting to chunked HTTP responses as is done in the technique known as Comet. To date, BOSH has been used mainly as a transport for traffic exchanged between Jabber/XMPP clients and servers (e.g., to facilitate connections from web clients and from mobile clients on intermittent networks). However, BOSH is not tied solely to XMPP and can be used for other kinds of traffic, as well.

if i remember correctly it just uses a single keep-alive http-connection where the server pushes the javascript-parts that should be executed at client side, but it has been quiet a while since i read about all that stuff.

for an example see jwchat (http://blog.jwchat.org/jwchat/) and punjab (http://code.stanziq.com/punjab), a browser-based jabber-over-http stack.

hello,
social network capabilities are something i'm sorely missing in the otherwise really great silverstripe framework.
there are some posts in the forum talking about a module to achieve this, but unfortunately there are no results on this.
i'd really love to do something alike for a current project, but i guess time&money will hold me back (as most of the other developers out there).
nevertheless i'm interested in what you've done here (looking nice!) - maybe you want to place your code somewhere for download
all the best
max

Hello rino,

I tried to install your chat module on my site (SS version 2.3.1) but it didn´t work. First I get a template error. When I´m dragging the chat box widget to my blog sidebar I get the following error message:
Fatal error: Call to undefined method Page::currentlyonline() in /var/www/1000/musik-kaiserslautern.de/htdocs/mm_chat/code/ChatPage.php on line 275

My Page.php doesn´t have a method currentlyonline().

Is this problem easy to fix? If not I would create a chat myself.