chat room script and (seperate) rss feeds

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  14 years ago

  by pcmattman

  pcmattman

  , Australia

  Joined 15 years ago

  hello everyone, 2 things 2 ask

  firstly, does anyone know how to make a php chat room without any flicker when the file is read again

  secondly, does anyone know how to do an rss feed with php, because some browsers can't read my javascript version (ie. read out the title and other text etc.. and print it out in a sidebar on a page)

  thanks in advance

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  14 years ago

  by Th3one

  James Moore

  Cheshire, United Kingdom

  Joined 14 years ago

  To be honest in this day and age if you're going to use php to create a chat room, use it in conjunction with ajax. Incredibly powerful, fast, reliable and perfect for multi-user dynamic content such as chat rooms. There's no point me writing a huge guide here on how to code ajax, all you need to know is it stands for asynchronious javascript and xml, and it can be used very well in conjunction with php to create responsive realtime web-based applications (eg chatrooms).
  
  http://www.google.co.uk/search?client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-GB%3Aofficials&hl=en&q=ajax&meta=&btnG=Google+Search
  should see you hit with 186 million results  :o)
  
  I learnt ajax using the following book:
  http://www.amazon.com/Ajax-Php-Building-Responsive-Applications/dp/1904811825/sr=8-7/qid=1157145401/ref=pdbbs_7/104-6894717-3921546?ie=UTF8&s=books&s9r=8a02a1a50b8ab099010bd7b9fd580022
  
  Very very good introduction to a very very good way of making dynamic web-based apps.
  
  As for the rss feeds i'm not too sure. I know again ajax is perfect for it, but i have very little rss experience. I'll speak to mates who've done similar in the past and get back to you buddy
   
  - Hope i've helped a bit, if you need any help drop me a line
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

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  14 years ago

  by pcmattman

  pcmattman

  , Australia

  Joined 15 years ago

  I was able to use SimpleXML in PHP to parse the rss feeds I needed to parse.

  My current problem is that AJAX doesn't work well with some browsers (meaning they can't see the chats)... any ideas??

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  14 years ago

  by Th3one

  James Moore

  Cheshire, United Kingdom

  Joined 14 years ago
  The problem itself it not with ajax as a whole, it's with people not enabling javascript. In this day and age if you dont have javascript enabled, then nobodys gunna want to speak to you anyway ;o) But on a serious note javascript is enabled by nearly everyone...There's very few cases of ajax not working. And even if it doesn't work, you could always make it detect that javascript isnt enabled and ask the user to enable it.
  
  A PHP-only chat room is not just quite hard to make, it's very hard to make run smoothly for the simple fact the processing is done at the server side, not client side. This means php cant update the page without using refresh constantly, and let's face it...we all hate pages that refresh every second. Alternatives you might want to look into are flash chat rooms, or maybe java. There's loads of guides for those on the internet.
  
  If you're looking for examples of any type of chat script try www.hotscripts.com, you can learn a lot from reading other peoples code.
  
  The top and bottom of it is, php is an amazing language...but it's just not the thing for a chat room, not unless it's used in conjunction with ajax to stop those nasty refreshes
  
  
  
  
  
  
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