[Prev][Next][Index][Thread]

Re: Simple "chat" facility

At 3:05 PM 8/12/96, Bill St. Clair wrote:
>At 1:48 AM -0400 8/12/96, John C. Mallery wrote:
>>At 12:01 AM -0400 1996-08-12, Bill St. Clair wrote:
>>
>>This is a nice application and example of thing one can do with a
>>lisp-based server. I think there is a premium on keeping it really simple
>>and yet fully functional.  That way, people can build other interesting
>>applications on top of this base.
>
>OK. I'll remember that as I work on it in my copious spare time.
>I haven't managed to connect with Terje Norderhaug's demo system; it must
>be down right now.

The chat demo is running at my home over a 28.8 modem, and is sometimes
down when I am testing new features. However, there are quite a number of
sites using the chat service. For example, Strata Inc is having a live chat
between developers and customers at 5:00 PM MST every Monday (see
http://www.strata3d.com/Forums/Forums.html for a schedule). Texas Singles
is another example which usually have a few dozen active participants even
at daytime. Their main room is at
http://206.103.124.13/interaction$/chat/texasroom

>From the description, it is a full-featured commercial
>product, not suitable for a simple example.

It is an example on what can be done with MCL, though ;-) Even an example
of that MCL can be used to make a commercial product...

The Chat of Interaction is kept fairly simple, as a clear goal has been to
make it easy to use rather than full of fancy features. I have searched for
a way to give the webmasters quite a bit of power in customizing it without
making it to hard and confusing.

I am incrementally documenting the class structure of the Interaction
software to allow third-party extensions (as I freeze design decisions), so
MCL programmers will soon be able to do changes to the Interaction Chat as
well to the other services and features with a high number of sites
interested in the result.

Currently LISP programmers can create and distribute "Tools" that does
various useful things for an Interaction web site. Tools are simply
arbitrary LISP code that is executed whenever somebody choose a
corresponding item from the Tools menu of Interaction, and provide a means
to add dialogs for controlling various aspects of the application as well
as for providing services for a web site (for example, a built-in HTML
validator would be a useful tool).

However, Interaction chat is targetted towards non-programmers. Thus a
framework in MCL that can be extended to tailored chat services by LISP
programmers for sure has its place. Such a framework will not be bound by
the limitation of making it easy to use for everybody, suggesting that it
should be designed to be particularly suited for more complex and flexible
experimentation with possible chat designs beyond what is possible from a
GUI.

>I used a slightly different mechanism for generating HTML on the
>fly than most of the examples. I put the static part of my HTML
>in a file which contains lisp forms surrounded by square brackets,
>e.g. [(do-something)]. This is slower and conses more than just generating
>the HTML with code, but it lets you change the look of the static part without
>recompiling anything. It also lets non lisp-programmers work on the static
>part with whatever web design tools they please and leaves only the dynamic
>stuff for coding. This isn't really an issue for the chat hack, since
>it's HTML is very simple, but it becomes more important (IMHO) for fancy
>pages that contain small dynamic sections.

This is essentially the same as Interaction chat does to allow extensive
customization, except that I have designed it based on the concepts of SGML
and thus use a slightly more complex model that doesn't mix any programming
code with the markup.


-- Terje <Terje@in-Progress.com>
   http://www.ifi.uio.no/~terjen/

   Make your Web Site a Social Place with Interaction!
   http://www.ifi.uio.no/~terjen/interaction