Chat system in Zend Framework website

Question

In my website, I have to make a chat system similar to Gmail so registered users can chat with their group. I have no idea about how I will do this. Can anyone provide me with an idea of how to implement this or any useful links? I have to do it using Zend Framework.

Answer 1

Since you are looking to work this out using Zend framework, have a look at Jaxl library (Jabber XMPP Client/Component Library). The library can be integrated with any existing website/framework and also contains several examples for browser based chat applications.

Answer 2

Actually there are two parts for chatting:

• A long running request that streams massges from the server to the client
• Ajax messages from the client to the server that sends one message to the server

For the second, any ajax framework will do it. For the first you might have a look at Comet to get the idea for this. But you should be aware that html isn't ment to be a chatting protocol. If you don't pay attention such stuff can easily kill your server.