Chat Software for Church Applications

Anyone with experience implementing medium-to-large-scale (1,000s of simultaneous conversations) web-based chat systems? I'm interested in knowing what products and protocols you'd recommend, what "lessons learned" you'd be willing to share, anything you think might be useful to know when going down this road.

Some of the products I have looked at include:

http://www.jabber.org
http://www.talisma.com/
http://www.liveperson.com/
http://www.instantservice.com/
http://www.boldchat.com/
http://www.websitealive.com/
http://www.chatstat.com

I know that the new Mormon.org web site has chat embedded into it (click on "Ask a Question"). I haven't looked into it since you are speaking with live missionaries at the Provo MTC. (I didn't want to bother them)

I am not aware of "Chat" being used for any other web sites sponsored by the Church.

The mormon.org chat is using a commercial product that integrates with its telophony system. Missionaries are able to both answer phones and take chat requests. I'm not sure if I should name the product, so I won't unless I get told I can, in which case, I will.

In a previous life, I worked on a project that included chat for large scale use. Beyond actually being able to scale reasonably, having an architecture that fits into your own architecture is really important. Unless it is just chat for the sake of chat, it will need to interact with other system to determine rooms, group membership, etc.

tj

haledn wrote:I know that the new Mormon.org web site has chat embedded into it (click on "Ask a Question"). I haven't looked into it since you are speaking with live missionaries at the Provo MTC. (I didn't want to bother them)

I am not aware of "Chat" being used for any other web sites sponsored by the Church.

Shellinese actually works for the Church, so he's more likely looking for "outside" opinions and experiences. Although, you have a valid point for him to look into the technology behind the MTC chat client, if he hasn't thought about it already.

Having done this very application as a demo of technology I developed for IBM, here are some pointers...

Protocol... http://www.cometd.com/
Implementation
(what I worked on)... https://www14.software.ibm.com/iwm/web/ ... /ibmajaxw/
Jetty... http://blogs.webtide.com:8080/gregw/200 ... 60000.html
ActiveMQ... http://activemq.apache.org/ajax.html
DWR... http://getahead.org/dwr/changelog/dwr20m2

And here are some ideas for an enhanced chat feature. If you have no network connectively, queue up messages and then send them when a connection is returned. Use might want to look at Google Gears.



Have fun!

mkmurray is right: I'm looking for outside experiences. We need to expand well beyond the capabilities of mormon.org in terms of scale and functionality.

Thanks for the information 16cards--I'll look into your suggestions.