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 → jaddison]

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 → icey]

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 → newsdog]

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 ?