Originally posted by Black Bug
Well, in all due respect Russ, in the 10 or so years I've been working on the net, every attempt to use a client side java app has failed due to incompatibilities with different client machines. Server side java on the other hand is cracking stuff as it's running on it's own and isn't reliant on a middleware interface.
I agree Java isn't perfect. The java certification is hard work for anyone who doesn't have £300 to pay Thwate or whoever
The other thing (which of course doesn't really apply to this chat room) is that running anything in a vm is so freaking slow. I don't like Java, its just the only/best solution I've found to people wanting a chat room. I really wanted something to use an IRC network as well.
At the moment the club chat room can't run in XP SP2 without downloading a new java install apparently, which will have a knock on effect to other java reliant MS apps of course because MS rule the world and be damned if anyone wants to try and utilise a global standard that doesn't include the tweaks that MS have made to that standard.
Yes, thats a MS thing though, it simply doesn't ask if you trust the certificate (which I digitally signed myself). I heard a rumour that MS is giving the MS vm the boot come next OS release. No doubt everyone will have to download the Sun jvm sooner or later anyway.
The chat app also doesn't run at all on Mac OS (OK version 9, may well run in OSX).
Thats only 5% of the world excluded then, and probably 3 people from the Z Club
Can you guess which 2 OSs I use daily yet on my dev machines?
I run XP SP2 and Fedora (on a vm) but I hate Fedora, I'm definately a MS person
To be honest I don't give any thought to compatabilities with anything other than MS/IE6, because thats what 95% of the people using this site will be using, and those who stray from the Windows/IE combo will be technically savy enough to write me a meaningful complaint with suggestions or figure out a work around
I expect anyone who is of that persuasion would use an irc client (mIRC,BitchX etc) anyway so it shouldn't be a problem. I would like to say "This site works in Netscape 3" lol but I simply don't have the time for it, nor can I sacrifice my machine to have every variation of browser/os on it for testing
Here's an example of a nice and easy flash chat room I did many years ago - amazingly it's still working but there are issues in that it constantly pings an asp script and so, unless checked, server log files can get a little on the large side.
I checked out that room, yes nice and easy but I hate (pet peev sorry) any chat room that doesn't run in real time or queries some chat log file every 15 seconds or so
I think our server maintains itself quite nicely so the log files wouldn't be an issue but I might just as well write a php chat room that refreshes a frame every 5 seconds if we go down that route.
If people do have trouble with the chat room still I need to hear about it of course otherwise I will never know something needs fixing
Anyway I just changed IRC servers so we might be ok again (or mostly ok).
Cheers
