Octopus Multi-User Chat
Technical ·Thursday March 26, 2009 @ 21:56 EDT (link)
Octopus Chat, my first Facebook (web) application, can communicate between users. It's not very polished—it uses user IDs instead of user names, for example, doesn't style the chat names, and doesn't do emoticons like standard 1:1 chat, but those are easy to fix. No link, because it's still private. Also, my server isn't equipped to handle the demand for a decent multi-user Facebook chat application—and the same goes for the other Facebook multi-user chat applications (either that, or they're so bad nobody wants to use them).
My test users and I tried it out, and Honey tested it, then our friend Chelsea tested it and it didn't work. Why? Internet Explorer. Argh. Same problem when I tried it on Internet Explorer locally, so at least it's reproducible, but debugging tools for IE are really poor (or really expensive). Seems I'll need to install Visual Studio to be able to debug and fix things. It may not be worth the effort… I learned how to build a Facebook (web) application (I'd already built a proof of concept desktop application), and do inter-user chat (although I'd like to find out if there's any way for Postgres to generate events on row insertions etc.; I suspect I'll probably need to use a stored procedure). (Update: Postgres can do events, using LISTEN and NOTIFY, although I may want to use a stored procedure to generate the events.)
Blog mocking parents obsessed with their kids discovered via LJ childfree: STFU, parents.
