A question for crypt or sunnyl or anyone who has experience making a chat program.

[Sophtware]

Hello... i am starting to make a IM... i am not having a problem making the program itself..but the thing i am confused and bummfuzzeled is...where would i put the server part of the program? ...on a web site? or what...

i dont want to hav a IM that only runs when i am online...thats lame...but then again if i put it on a web site..why not make it in JAVASCRIPT.

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance.

If you mean like in ICQ, where you can send offline messages and messages can be received when you go online, the easiest way is to write a dedicated server version for your software which runs continuously on a permanently connected machine with preferrably a fixed IP so clients all over can connect.

I can't really tell you if its possible to put it on a webpage, because I've never done that kind of programming, but just from a educated guess, I don't think so, as if it was possible people would've done it with the free web hosting companines out there already instead of using dedicated servers. However, this might be due the speed and the ease of maintaining the server...I don't really know!

I usually write Winsock programs for LAN, rarely for online use.

Sunny

[Sophtware]

i will have to think about this...thanks anyway.

[Crypt]

Yeah sunnyl is right you will probably need to have a server machine constantly connected to the net running the server software.

Not neccessairly with a fixed ip address you might have an asp page on another server which when the server computer gets a new ip your server requests this asp file which would prints the servers ip address to a text file, and then the client just requests this text file from the server and gets the ip and then connects to it(just an idea).

but you would most likely need a server computer to do host the server program as I doubt it would be possible for it to be written completely in asp, or java.

[noone]

It may be possible for you to do this off a web server, if you wrote a CGI/Servlet that would do the work for you and your program would request the page and parse the results. But that is a lot easier said then done, and you'll run across a lot of headaches. Not to mention I don't know of any free webhosting companies that would let you open a network connection from a server side script.

What may be more feasible is some sort of peer to peer set up where a server side script simply helps the clients find each other.

Now this would be a pain to do but...

How about you let the users be servers? Just like in Windows 95/98 peer to peer network, there is browse master that is automatically elected and that computer keeps track of all resources available for the network.

Something similar could be done for a IM program with the clients, when ever you send a message you can get that person's IP, and when you send a message to someone else, you might attach that IP to the message telling that someone the IP can be used as a server. Because people keep on passing 'server' IPs around, the people who receive messages can keep a list of IPs they can use a servers.

I know already it'll be a pain to do...but if this could actually work it would be quite amazing - a completely self contained server-client network. Actually I might start on some of this...

Sunny

[Sophtware]

That was what i was thinking of doing..but i was hoping there would be a easier way...but ill give it a try!

Thanks to everyone.