Best platform for setting up a chat room ???

[mine's a guinness]

Hi all,

I was wondering if anyone could offer some advice. I am developing a message board using Flash, PHP, SQL and MySQL. This application, together with the clients website is hosted on a UNIX server at an ISP. The client wishes to develop a chat room facility. What technologies would you suggest using that would be compatible with the above set up. Both the message boards and the chat room will need to share the same Username/password database.

Any tips here would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers,

MAG.

[bobajobrob]

Java is probably the easiest and most robust way to develop a chat server application, depending on your outlook, but PHP and PERL have socket functionality that you can use and will be adequate for a chat room. PHP's socket functionality is 'experimental' but that doesn't mean it's unreliable. Go to www.php.net and search for 'socket' in the function list.

if you're a masochist, you can write one in C, but I wouldn't recommend it