Forum Moderators: phranque
Could this be used to have a web page access messenger and use it to IM? It would make chatting at college/work a whole lot easier, as well as making a web site very sticky (until it's sued by MS of course...) but is it possible?
Just a thought :P
-- James.
Microsoft doesn't seem to mind Trillian and other programs like it that combine multiple instant messaging protocols. Trillian is basically doing the same thing through software that you want to do through the web - they figured out what all of the required parameters were that make the instant messaging client "tick" and built their own. Nothing would stop you from doing the same thing in a web-based version.
Don't IM clients just issue a CONNECT to the proxy to open a connection through to the server? I don't think they actually use HTTP GET/POST in anyway that would be suitable for a CGI script to reimplement.
There really isn't any way I'm aware of to do it through HTTP - what I was saying was that he could develop an application that either loads from a web page (ActiveX or Java), or a back-end component that can output text to a user's browser.
Constant two-way connectivity is key for instant messaging clients - HTTP doesn't do this, so the only way for him to accomplish what he wants is to have some middle-ware between the web page and the IM server. AOL instant Messenger is supposed to be coming out with an API for this purpose pretty soon.
-- James.
