Level: Intermediate

Jack D Herrington (jherr@pobox.com), Senior Software Engineer, Leverage Software Inc.

04 Dec 2007

Learn to build a chat system into your Web application with Asynchronous JavaScript™ + XML (Ajax) and PHP. Your customers can talk to you and to each other about the content of the site without having to download or install any special instant-messaging software.

Developers talk a lot about community when the term Web 2.0 comes up. And whether you think it's hype or not, the idea of engaging your customers or readers in an instantaneous conversation about the topics at hand or the products you're selling is pretty compelling. But how do you get there? Can you put a chat box on the same page as your product listing so that your customers don't have to install special software or even Adobe Flash Player? Sure! Turns out, you can do it all with free, off-the-shelf tools such as PHP, MySQL, dynamic HTML (DHTML), Ajax, and the Prototype.js library.

Without further ado, let's jump right into the implementation.

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Please access the below link to view the full content.

Original link: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-ajaxxml8/?S_TACT=105AGX54&S_CMP=A1214&ca=dnw-848