I'm looking to add chat functionality to my site so that users of my site can chat with one another. Most chat widgets I have found online (i.e. such as the ones here) allow for chat between site administrators and users (for the purpose of customer support). As opposed to customer support, I want chat on my site to serve as an end functional feature. Is there a widget I can use to do this? I am looking for the simplest possible way to do this. Any pointers in the right direction would be helpful.
Thanks!
If this is low scale, where you aren't going to have hundreds of users, you may want to start with this solution:
http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/javascript-ajax/how-to-create-a-simple-web-based-chat-application/
The key here on the users side is the statement:
setInterval (loadLog, 2500);
This is where the users end in Javascript checks out if there is anything new every 2.5 seconds. Set it higher, and it won't check as often, but it also won't bug the server with the PHP code as often. This solution is easy to implement, but also has the weakness that if it gets too popular, your server host could get too many requests than it can handle.
Related
The question is pretty clear I think, but I will elaborate on why I'm asking it.
I created a little blog engine based on OneNote. Basically, the blog configuration asks for an access to OneNote. Then the user chooses a section under which the blog posts are stored.
There is a cron script that will use all these informations to automatically get new pages, fetch the medias and cache every, and finally display the posts.
I chose OneNote because I own three Windows 8 computers and a Windows Phone, so OneNote was an easy choice, as I didn't want to get an other application to manage my blog.
There is still a lot to do (as always with softwares...), but I want to make this more or less an open source project, so that other people can install it on their websites and link it directely to OneNote.
The only "big" obstacle for this now is that authentication in the OneNote API needs to register the application on the Live Connect, and specify a redirect domain. So every user wishing to use this blog engine on their server will have to register their own application... That will look complicated just for a blog, especially if you're not tech-savvy.
Is there a way to "skip" or work around this requirement, even if it requires the user to make the section public (as it is for a blog, this doesn't seem too much to ask) ?
Thank you in advance,
Cheers
Sounds like an awesome project! When you get it released be sure to let us know at #OneNoteDev.
Unfortunately, at this time there's no way to circumvent the requirement for Live Connect OAuth configuration. You could offer a hosted variant so only you need to worry about the LiveID configuration.
First time post here, so forgive me for any bad etiquette/format.
I will preface by saying:
I have (over the last few months) been developing an iOS app for work. To be more specific, I am developing an inventory app to track bar inventory (liquor, beer, wine, etc). I can give more specifics on request if needed. I have most of the functionality done, only a couple more things I would like to implement. Eventually I will be porting it to Android as well.
At the moment, I have the model objects being archived to the local filesystem for saving and loading of data. However, my goal would be to database the model objects with the ability to display the information on a webpage. My logic is that no matter where the user is, he/she will be able to sign in to a service using a username and password, and view correctly formatted current/past inventories online. This is to allow the ability for a bartender to record the inventory, and have the bar manager view the inventory instances without having to have the physical device that recorded the inventory in his/her possession.
So here is my question:
Without being too general, what kind of service would I need to pull this off? I have a good amount of relevant front-end experience, specifically with iOS, Objective-C, HTML and CSS. However, I have ZERO experience on the back-end. I have researched around the internet, and I am aware of things such as cloud databases, web hosting and MySQL, etc. However, I cannot seem to find a definitive answer without asking my specific question. I suppose I would just like to be pointed in the right direction before investing money and time into a service that may prove useless to my cause.
Any resources and help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!
There's not a definitive answer and you have a lot of options.
For me, the simplest is to set up a server with a database incorporated (mysql for example) and with a web service (written in PHP for example) that manages the database and queries on that.
Online you can find tons of guide on how to write a script in PHP that manages a database:
http://www.freewebmasterhelp.com/tutorials/phpmysql/2
For the iOS part you can follow also this guide:
http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/software-engineer/create-your-own-web-service-for-an-ios-app-part-one/
Good luck!
As an example if I have a small group of people at a college and I want to create a chat room application which each user can download and then open to view list of all available users to talk to and click one of the users in a list then a window pops and any text you enter goes to that specific person. How can I make this? I have made a chatroom using AJAX and html etc but I have never done a chatroom for a network such as the one you have in schools or work places. What language would I need? All help is appreciated since I am total new to this.
I read something on internet about winsock connections but there wasn't much I could find.
You can use sockets for network programming in java.
Look at this Deitel's tutorial about a java messenger application.
http://www.deitel.com/books/jhtp7/DeitelMessenger.pdf
I'm looking for web applications that users can use without registration, just by visiting the site, and make you register later after you spent some time.
Any good examples?
Stack Overflow; question an answer sites.
Google News; blogs and newsfeeds.
Apple's iTunes Store, Amazon; anything where you have a shopping cart.
:-)
There's this site called StackOverflow.com
Sometimes when you are looking for example sites that you've seen in the past, it is just to increase your own confidence that you are doing it right. If you have a good idea of the advantages of this style of progressive registration, why not take a moment to write down & plan out how it should work for your site?
Edit content without registration (but create a pseudo-account using IP address):
wikipedia
Register with your email address, optionally password protect your account later:
http://www.instapaper.com/
Registration as a side effect of paying for a product
Amazon (if I remember correctly)
Client has a dating site and would like to have a popup (either a nice javascript overlay or a new browser window popup. we're flexible.) displayed to users when another user is visiting their page.
I'm familiar with push technology and Comet but it's quite challenging to implement this and may place serious strain on a server with over 100,000 unique visitors per day.
I'm wondering if there is a way of faking this, perhaps by not being accurate to the second. I can't really think of any way.
This is a classic LAMP environment.
Anyone?
EDIT: what about this: placing an iframe on the page that refreshes every few seconds and at each page load it checks in the db if a visitor has been logged on this profile page. if so, it shows a message. the message would be visible but the background of the iframe would blend in with the background of the site and be invisible. if the message fades in and out, it would look like a JS box "popping up".
The only way to "fake" comet is via polling of some sort, which is always a possibility. An iframe, xhr, or jsonp request are all possibilities for performing said polling.
You might be better off purchasing a pre-built comet server (I'll recommend, of course, the one I helped build, WebSync for IIS/ASP.NET). If you're worried about the load, you could check out our On-Demand version where we'll host it for you.
Regardless, WebSync (or whatever other pre-packaged product you might check out) would scale to a hundred thousand users a day without much of a problem, and would potentially be more efficient than polling, since it would only hit your database when new users arrived, rather than every couple seconds; that said, if you keep the "check for new users" query simple enough, and a few seconds of delay is OK, the polling idea would be the "simpler" solution.
Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Sockets if you want to do real push. This isn't widely supported in browsers yet, but there are plenty of JavaScript and Flash libraries that provide it already.
Or a cheaper way is to record in your DB each page view.
Then when any user makes a web request, check in the DB if anybody has visited their page since their last web request.
If so, pop up your dialog.
This second way wouldn't popup anything if the user just left their browser sitting there, but if they were actively interacting with the site, it would achieve your goals very easily.
I would start with this second simpler solution, which is very easy to implement. If your client wants it more interactive, you can provide solutions and tradeoffs/costs for various options.
Gather statistics as to how many visitors that user's website gets per day, and then subdivide that, so that it's a percentage chance that the user will be told there is a user on his site (even if there actually isn't), based within the timeframe he's at the part where he can receive the popup. I think this is the closest you are going to get without having some sort of notification being sent.
You could do this to minimize server usage if you wanted push:
When a user visits a website, check and see if the person who would be getting the notification is online and capable of being notified, and if so, THEN do all the push stuff, otherwise forget it.