implementing a AJAX chat site

Question

I want to implement a chat site with following features:

1. Direct one-on-one chat with a randomly picked stranger
2. If my conversation partner gets disconnected, I should be shifted to different stranger

In short, I want to imitate http://omegle.com/

Which language is best suited to this task? Jsp and Java? PHP? ASP? Others?

Should all of the messages go through the web server, or is there a better approach?

Answer 1

You may want to look into Google Web Toolkit (GWT). Ryan Dewsbury's book "Google Web Toolkit Applications" actually runs you through the process of writing a basic chat application.

GWT lets you write Java code that is compiled into Javascript for AJAX applications.

Answer 2

I wrote an AJAX Chat tutorial years ago at:

http://www.dynamicajax.com/fr/AJAX_Driven_Web_Chat-271_290_291.html

I also did a JSON version of it too:

http://www.dynamicajax.com/fr/JSON_AJAX_Web_Chat-271_290_324.html

Those are written in PHP but the back end is really simple so you can port it to whatever language you want easily. Here's a version that I converted to ASP.NET

http://www.dynamicajax.com/fr/AJAX_Web_Chat_ASP_NET-271_290_328.html

It works pretty much like Omegle, all you need to do is setup the code to randomly select a stranger.

Answer 3

I recently created a chat script using PHP + AJAX. Yes, all of my chat messages went through the server because it used AJAX and server-side PHP scripting to deliver the messages to the recipient(s).

For an example of a PHP chat script, see: http://www.phpfreechat.net/