What should a real time web based text editor and Instant messenger be made with?

Question

I'm looking in to making a real time collaborated Text editor and Instant messenger for a web site I am doing. what would be the best tools & language to do this in?

I see Java script could be a good choice for the editor. could the IM also be done in Java script?

Answer 1

It would be helpful to understand more of the specific requirements - a collaborative text editor could mean many things. IM is a little easier to understand.

For the text editor - depending on your requirements etc. - I would start by using an existing text editor - http://www.tinymce.com/ has decent features and is used widely. You can customize it to remove features you don't want/need (e.g. formatting), whilst retaining features many people would expect (like undo/redo and spell check). You would need to figure out how to make it collaborative though - not sure what user experience you're aiming for. It's relatively easy to allow users to "take turns" editing the current document - save it to a database (using PHP, Ruby or Rails, Java - whatever you're most comfortable with) when the user presses "save", and develop a locking mechanism to deal with concurrent access. It's a lot harder to have the document reflect real-time changes between multiple users and update the document for all those users. You'd benefit from a good "DIFF" program. In this case, I don't think you can avoid AJAX - you need many clients to communicate with each other, and there's no reliable client-side way of doing that afaik.

For IM, I'd look at using an off-the-shelf solution based on XMPP (http://xmpp.org/xmpp-software/) - it's pretty much the agreed standard for IM, and whilst it may take a while to get up to speed with the standard and tooling, if you want to deliver a fully featured app, it's likely to be far easier to build on top of all the plumbing others have done than build your own.

Answer 2

I'd say you need to look at something like AJAX.

Answer 3

a collaborative website-based text editor sounds like quite a challenge. assuming youre looking at built-in browser capabilities, javascript with xmlhttprequests is probably an (the only?) option. a messenger is easy enough if you hook up some xml or json to a database. php and mysql are always nice, given the scale of the user base and the amount of info lurking around the internet.