Looking for Free Open Source AJAX chat with special feature.

Special feature would be AJAX name list you can put on all pages...

[JAB Creations]

I'm curious if there is an open source AJAX chat room that includes an AJAX list of names of people who are in the chat room. This would be VERY useful for visitors. When someone logs in to the chat named "Frank" then Frank's name would appear on every page on one's site. That would lure more people to chat who saw someone enter the chat. Furthormore if it is/was implemented via AJAX this would occur live without the reload/refresh.

Just an awesome idea and I wonder if anyone has done it yet.

- John

[siMKin]

This has nothing to do with AJAX really.
Most chatrooms use a database of some sort in which the names are stored. And when you want to display this on every page of your website you'll just need to request the names to the database with a server-side scripting language. With AJAX you'd have to use that same server-side scripting language anyways, except that you load the name after the page is loaded. So you don't really gain anything by it.
Even, looking for and Open Source AJAX Chat, won't gain you anything. Just the fact that the chat uses AJAX doesn't say anything. AJAX is only a technique, not a script/programming language. So this would have zero benefit with regard to displaying the names on the rest of your website

[JAB Creations]

the fact that the chat uses AJAX doesn't say anything

- siMKin

lure more people to chat who saw someone enter the chat

- John

Please read posts before replying to them!

- John

[siMKin]

my mistake .. i overlooked the 'saw enter' part .. i thought you just wanted a list of names on each page.

The second half of my post is still valid though. It doesn't matter how the chat is programmed and what techniques it uses, in order to put something like that - using AJAX - on your website. So, instead of focusing your search only on AJAX chats, better look for any free open source chat.

[trillianjedi]

Just an awesome idea and I wonder if anyone has done it yet.

Yes. Google (within GMail).

I'm not a JS expert, but I believe the code is in raw source so could be examined....?

TJ

[siMKin]

The JS part of the story is very basic and not interesting at all. Just a matter of creating a timeout function that checks a server-side script every x-seconds to see if anyone new entered the chat. If it gets a response: display it, if not: do nothing.
The server-side script is really doing all the work and that's something you cannot see. But even that is fairly easy to make.

[trillianjedi]

I thought the server side would just be a simple change in state (as in "list has changed")?

[siMKin]

basically, that is what it should do. the only thing there is to it, is to recognise a change in state, but that's not too hard.
that's why i said it's fairly simple ;-)

[JAB Creations]

The reason I posted about AJAX was because I knew this method would require it's use.

I would highly prefer to find something written in PHP and if a DB is required MySQL.

About the only editing I could actually do would be to modify the XHTML and CSS at this moment in time.

- John

[visionmonster]

might check this out:

[socket7.net...]

Lace is a free Ajax chat application. It takes advantage of Ajax (XMLHttpRequest) if present, and degrades gracefully if it is not.