scalability

AJAX chat and IM applications reviewed

• Posted by Rob (#1) on July 11, 2006 15:38 CEST

AJAX magazine (part of PHP magazine) has a review of AJAX chat applications. Unfortunately none of the offerings are truly spectacular, so I have not been able to find cool, new ideas for my own AJAX chat yet. I'm more hopeful to find advanced features in IM clients such as Meebo and eBuddy, but perhaps I will have to come up with a few myself. This should not be too challenging considering my experience running a full-featured telnet chat room in the late nineties (a.k.a. a haven).

Scalability is still a major issue I need to think about. Ordinary AJAX applications can actually reduce server load because the same actions as usual carry less overhead (by not loading an entire page, styled and all). But a chat application needs to continuously query a server for new data available. While a thousand users editing a calendar will ultimately result in just a thousand queries storing the new entries, a thousand simultaneous chatters generate a thousand requests per second, continuously checking for new data while rapidly generating even more of their own.

(Note to self: I should use my journal as a bookmark system more often. Too often I can't remember why I bookmarked something, or I can't remember a URL simply because I don't intend to visit a site even though I like its concept and might want to make some remarks.)

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• Tags: Ajax, chat, scalability
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