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I am working on a dating site and would like the users to be able to chat with thier friends. I originally was going to integreate with Meebo to provide the chat feature, much like MyYearbook, but Meebo will only provide that service to large sites.

I am willing to learn and code this thing myself, but need to be pointed in the right direction.

Is there a tutorial for this? All of the tutorials i can find are for site chat that allows anyone on the site to participate. I need only friends to be able to see that friends are online, then to chat.

Are there any technologies out there that could be integrated to the site to provide this?

marc_s
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Zac Brown
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  • What you really need is to read up on some API providing geoip lookups otherwise you wont be able to make the commercial you need. – stefan Nov 08 '11 at 18:13

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Most simple solutions use polling, which is fine for low volume, but in high volume the number of hits will become an issue. Here's a link that (I think) uses polling and should give you some ideas how to start: http://www.phpfreechat.net/

But for higher volume, you probably need to get away from polling. This question talks about some strategies for that: Use HTTP Keep-Alive for server to communicate to client

Community
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Aerik
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  • Ok, so I should probably look into the HTTP Keep-Alive method for the chat system? – Zac Brown Nov 08 '11 at 18:41
  • If it was me, I'd write it with polling (for simplicity) but modularize the communication layer so you can replace it with a keep alive solution later. EDIT: Actually, I'd write it with a fairly long duration polling, then make it smart enough to recognize when a conversation is happening and shorten the polling interval (or switch to keep-alive solution) during a conversation. – Aerik Nov 08 '11 at 19:06