Anyone seen the chat app at Ultrashock.com?

[apwalton]

Any idea how they pulled this off? How do you get the real time text messages with action script?

[Rog]

XML Sockets.. or rather a socket server streaming data to/from Flash in XML format.

Basically a chat is the world's easiest implementation of the XML Socket features of Flash 5. The server just needs to echo-back to all clients what all of the other clients are feeding in. Not only is it real-time, but it's also more efficient than HTTP (for chat purposes at least).

There are currently several Java-based echo servers that folks have made for specifically this purpose. There are also commercially available XML servers (mostly intended for e-commerce apps). If you know Perl or C it should be relatively easy to create a streaming server to integrate with Flash. With PHP it's a bit harder (mostly because those functions are new and undocumented, but myself and others are working on deciphering).

This sort of thing does require that you have your own server or access to run software on the server, since it's not done via the webserver.