Good realtime chat / whiteboard applications to be used with Zope?
Hi, this is a question related to the intranet thread. Does anyone of you have any good examples or experiences of good realtime chat or whiteboard applications that could be used with Zope? If you have been using something, what has been the setup and how has it worked. Here are some thougths without the whiteboard. 1) IRC-server + java irc-client This could be a nice way of doing things. Company's internal irc-server and you could connect into it via browser - or instant messenger that support IRC. Server would throw logs into the Zope and archive those in similar fashion like blog entrys. Whiteboard could then be another application ,applet, that only does the whiteboard part of it. IRC benefits is the possibility to use also other clients than browser and take part into discussions even though you are also doing something else. Bots etc. are also nice bonus, since engineers could write AI bots that diagree to everything and agree to payraise discussions ,-) Questions: - Good and easy to maintain irc-servers? - Good java irc-client? 2) Jabber Is this a dead idea? Iäm not that familiar with Jabber that I could actually say anything - but there seem to be a lot of people exited about Jabber. For me the instant messaging has never been anything important and in this application Jabber would be used in a conference mode - which is just like irc. And there is jabber.py library to access Jabber from python. Whiteboards and chats: ---------------------- I just downlaoded BabylonChat from ( http://www.visopsys.org/andy/babylon/index.html ) and was instantly impressed about it. It is written in Java, seems to work and can be used as an applet or application. I saw other software also on freshmeat and did some searches on google. Seems that chat and whiteboard are very popular terms in many pages. Now my question is, does anybody else use some other application for the same thing? What are your experiences? Others: http://www.duke.edu/~java20/jaws/ http://www.webponent.com/ - Commecial approx. $250 What else? ps. watching Sphere DVD now. Somehow there is a underwater / alien theme going on in the movies I take to my hands from my DVD-shelves. ,-) -huima
Questions: - Good and easy to maintain irc-servers?
the bog-standard open source IRC servers that are used all over the internet are usually "fire and forget". you configure and start the server and it runs and that's the end of it.
- Good java irc-client?
why java? most if not all jave clients are unstable and clunky. why not just instruct people do download and use a *real* IRC client for their platform? ok, you might lose the convenient "user clicks here on the intranet and the java client fires up and does the right thing", but how important is that compared to all those issues that you will come up against, inevitably, with java client, such as:: - instability - platform compatibility/browser compatibility jens
Jens Vagelpohl wrote:
the bog-standard open source IRC servers that are used all over the internet are usually "fire and forget". you configure and start the server and it runs and that's the end of it.
Ok. Then possibly only thing that would need to be done is a way to monitor and possibly do simple controlling of the server, like restart the server.
why java? most if not all jave clients are unstable and clunky. why not just instruct people do download and use a *real* IRC client for their platform? ok, you might lose the convenient "user clicks here on the intranet and the java client fires up and does the right thing", but how important is that compared to all those issues that you will come up against, inevitably, with java client, such as::
- instability - platform compatibility/browser compatibility
Good points. I am only thinking about the ease of use, or atleast the ease of beginng the use. Applet could be easily included on frameset, where the whiteboard applet would be too. Or if we free our mind and just think about an application that would have both the whiteboard / workspace and the chat, then we have more freedom for thougth. In my scenario, just thinking it up, it could be downloaded and launched as a Java webstart application. Downloaded only first time and after that just launched again and again. Just like ArgoUML. Just a thougth. This kind of application would be nice. Especially if the workspace / whiteboard part could be almost anything. I mean people could program different kind of workspaces where poeple can interact - think abaout the possibility of working on top of a powerpoint presentation, where everyone could leave marks on top of pages and chat while doing it. Or going to more extreme. Playing a movie and making marks on the screen in different timeframes. All and all. What I am looking for, should be: 1) Easy to use, for the end users - intuitive, fast, doesn't need additional installations or downloads 2) Easy to maintain, for administrators - server part would be fire and forget and very little dependant on other things. 3) Easy to take in use inside the intranet - users only click a link - notes, chat etc. should be easily saved and archived into the intranet -huima
Jens Vagelpohl wrote:
why java? most if not all jave clients are unstable and clunky. why not just instruct people do download and use a *real* IRC client for their platform? ok, you might lose the convenient "user clicks here on the intranet and the java client fires up and does the right thing", but how important is that compared to all those issues that you will come up against, inevitably, with java client, such as::
- instability - platform compatibility/browser compatibility
Oh, come on, this is pure FUD. linux.com had a java irc client for years, and it worked without a hitch (for me, admittedly I didn't use it soo much). And newer java JREs work quite well for a while. I writing that because I see more and more really well working java GUI applications (eclipse, jedit <- very nice, argo) with _none_ of the problems you are stating here. And if someone painted recent stability and browser compability problems with zope (text width, login problems in IE, thread issues in solaris, pre python 2.1.3 crashes/corruption etc.) with the same broad brush, I'd object too. cheers, oliver
On Sun, Aug 04, 2002 at 10:51:56AM -0400, Jens Vagelpohl wrote:
Questions: - Good and easy to maintain irc-servers?
the bog-standard open source IRC servers that are used all over the internet are usually "fire and forget". you configure and start the server and it runs and that's the end of it.
Here at Nice University we're using dancer-ircd + dancer-services which are really easy to install considering that I'm a real beginner at IRC. However "securing" it a bit is difficult because of lack of doc.
- Good java irc-client?
We also use the Eteria irc java applet which seems to work nice in browsers (the ones I've tested). Problem is you must install it on the same server as the irc server since code is not signed. I'm considering to write some gateway to register users at the irc server when they are registered on the Zope server, but I've not begun yet. FYI we use this solution to allow distant-learning students to provide feedback to the teachers in real time when doing live audio or video courses. The dynamically created Zope page fires both the player (Real) and the irc applet, with irc channel name depending on the course. Jerome Alet
participants (4)
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alet＠unice.fr -
Heimo Laukkanen -
Jens Vagelpohl -
Oliver Bleutgen