What are the available solutions for embedding chat functionality into website?

Question

We want to implement chat on our website so that users can communicate with each other.

Our general requirements are:

1. It should be rendered on our web pages, but it could be rendered in an IFrame or something like that. The users of our website are part of the general public, not internal teams, so we don't want them to have to install a separate app.

2. Users should be able to use their existing account with our website and not have to create a new account for the chat tool. If we partner with someone, like Meebo, we don't want to have to share a significant amount of our user information for partner.

3. Code under an public license, but preferably not an open-source project using the GPL license, but BSD or MIT license (and probably others) is okay. An inexpensive product with a non-public license may be okay as well.

4. We want to get this implemented pretty quickly, and we don't really want to build our own solution.

Has anyone worked with or familiar with a solution that would satisfy some or all of these these requirements? Any other ideas/suggestions?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Hi, There are quite a few. As for open source try

https://blueimp.net/ajax/

If you need a heavy duty chat server with web based extension look at

http://www.igniterealtime.org

We currently used this internally in a Windows enviornment. We had some issues getting it to work with Active Directory so we went for the mySQL installation.

Why not shell out a few bucks for (sometimes it's cheaper NOT to re-invent the wheel)

http://www.aspnetajaxchat.com

Hope that helps