

Ask HN: Realtime chat engine - adharma

What is the best technology to implement real time chat engine ?
======
jaddison
Ummm... your own IRC server? Seems pretty realtime to me, and quite
configurable. Of course, IRC is geared towards group chat, not user-user.

Perhaps include some more details about what your restrictions/requirements
are - will the users be web-based? How many concurrent users will you expect
online at any given time?

If you're looking for advice from others, it's best to provide as much info as
you can.

~~~
adharma
Sorry for the lack of information, but the engine I'm looking for is web-based
and able to do group chat or real time collaboration, and assume the engine
can communicate with Ruby On Rails.

------
jalammar
I looked into this previously and was interested most by XMPP. You can use
open source servers like Openfire (Java,
<http://www.igniterealtime.org/projects/openfire/index.jsp>) or eJabberd
(Erlang, <http://www.ejabberd.im/>). It's more instant messaging than
chatting, though (although it does support multi user chat)

------
icey
Are you looking to write something, or use something like mibbit?

(In other words, would mibbit do what you needed?)

~~~
adharma
Can mibbit do realtime collaboration ? Actually the one I need is web based
group chat and realtime collaboration, so other than chat the group can do
realtime collaboration too.

------
newsdog
Comet?

~~~
adharma
I search and found Ajax Push Engine, is it belong to Comet ? The exactly
technology that I need is group chat or realtime collaboration, does this
technology serve well ?

