AjaxChat |  |
Overview
We've all heard the buzz about this AJAX thing, and over and over there are questions asked on the Struts mailing lists about how to use AJAX in a Struts app. Well, now you have what is, hopefully, a good real-world example of doing just that! This is your typical chat application ala Yahoo! Chat, built on Struts and utilizing AJAX techniques. It is hoped that this shows how to meld the two together to produce applications that might not otherwise be possible.
Features
- Multiple simultaneous users can chat in multiple rooms
- Rooms can be configured via XML config file
- Cross-browser (tested in IE 6.0 and FireFox 1.0)
- The ability to change font sizes and colors (your and theirs)
- Real, live demo available here (note that this IS NOT guaranteed to be available, but usually will be)
What's New
v1.2 now available!
12/28/2005 - Just a minor fix, the web.xml DTD reference was to version 2.2 instead of the correct 2.3.
v1.1 now available!
12/17/2005 - This release corrects a problem seen under certain circumstances in Internet Explorer where the browser would cache an AJAX request, and subsequent requests would get the document stored in the cache. This is corrected with a dummy request parameter appended to all AJAX calls (except the one to post messages to a room) which makes the URL unique for every call, and hence IE does not cache them (or more precisely, it probably does, but we force it to not pull from the cache).
v1.0 now available!
12/5/2005 - Yep, I skipped beta because it seems to be quite stable now, so anyone that is interested should feel free to do so now. This should be the last release for a while... although I have a number of interesting features I'd like to add, I have a bunch of other things on my plate, so I don't know when I'll get to them. This release should completely serve its purpose as an example though, and hopefully will prove useful too. Enjoy!
v1.0 Alpha 2 now available!
11/30/2005 - Hot on the heels of the first release comes the second. This addresses some issues that arose when running the app in Resin (and presumably some others) and accessing the app with Firefox (the combination of Resin and Firefox specifically caused some problems). Should be all OK now and I am not currently aware of any problems with this release. Also includes some minor enhancements and cleanups. Check the release notes for full details.
AjaxChat initial release!
11/29/2005 - Version 1.0 alpha is now available for download!
Usage
At present, AjaxChat is available in a zip archive that is an exploded webapp. Simply unzip it into the appropriate location in your servlet container of choice and you should be all set. It *may* be necessary to also add the Commons Validator to WEB-INF/lib in some containers. This will be rectified in a future release.
Contact
Please contact Frank W. Zammetti with questions, comments and suggestions.
Contributors
Frank W. Zammetti is the only current contributor. Well, that's not *entirely* true...
Wendy Smoak has helped test this on occassion, so I suppose you could call her a contributor!
