AJAX Chatbox for Pascal developers?

[code_glitch]

@Dan: Got back from 3 week holiday, and now its about as stressful as the rest of the year and thats a late night post. TBH I don't remember what I was smoking but it was pretty good and I'd definitely like to find some more

[phibermon]

Can I please itterate I'm not attempting to start a flame war and that I have been a keen user of IRC in the past

And there's no reason a custom client can't be written, it's just that instead of a direct TCP connecton your client would use HTTP as the transfer mechansim. The client side would be forwarding messages using some form of AJAX interface which if it was so desired could be written into a Chat client. I believe there are several Web MSN clients that use a similar technique.

But to play devils advocate once more, perhaps there are AJAX IRC clients that by means of server side code, can transfer messages back and forth. In fact a quick search finds this :

http://www.vedetta.com/ajax-irc-clients-list

But I should imagine that these require server side code as stated in order to make the actual connections to an IRC server.

I would say that in order to have the most accessible chat system, an AJAX/http interface would be the way to go. My preference still lies with a system such as AJAX Chat for all the web tech features it offers. But there's a lot of clients in that list, perhaps one of them layers additional web functionality similar to AJAX chat while still connecting to a normal IRC Server. Administration however is still an issue as it's not possible for admins to be connected all the time, a restricted member only chat tied into the existing user system would be a big win in that respect.

It would probably take a lot more work to write a bot that managed members (tied into VBulletin) and held the room. Plus the bot would have to conform to the rules of the chosen IRC server which are almost always against bots that restrict access to rooms.

If the decision is made to add chat to PGD then I personally will not further my debate if software/bot and server could be suggested that can equal AJAX chat in minimum implementation work and ease of administration tasks. While the web 2.0 features of AJAX Chat would be great to have, standard IRC will serve to meet the task.