[Zope] Good realtime chat / whiteboard applications to be used with Zope?

[Heimo Laukkanen]

Hi,

this is a question related to the intranet thread.

Does anyone of you have any good examples or experiences of good=20
realtime chat or whiteboard applications that could be used with Zope?=20
If you have been using something, what has been the setup and how has=20
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=20
irc-server and you could connect into it via browser - or instant=20
messenger that support IRC.

Server would throw logs into the Zope and archive those in similar=20
fashion like blog entrys. Whiteboard could then be another application=20
,applet, that only does the whiteboard part of it.

IRC benefits is the possibility to use also other clients than browser=20
and take part into discussions even though you are also doing=20
something else. Bots etc. are also nice bonus, since engineers could=20
write AI bots that diagree to everything and agree to payraise=20
discussions ,-)

Questions:
- Good and easy to maintain irc-servers?
- Good java irc-client?


2) Jabber

Is this a dead idea? I=E4m not that familiar with Jabber that I could=20
actually say anything - but there seem to be a lot of people exited=20
about Jabber. For me the instant messaging has never been anything=20
important and in this application Jabber would be used in a conference=20
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 (=20
http://www.visopsys.org/andy/babylon/index.html ) and was instantly=20
impressed about it. It is written in Java, seems to work and can be=20
used as an applet or application.

I saw other software also on freshmeat and did some searches on=20
google. Seems that chat and whiteboard are very popular terms in many=20
pages.

Now my question is, does anybody else use some other application for=20
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=20
theme going on in the movies I take to my hands from my DVD-shelves. ,-)

-huima