I wrote an application which might be worth of sharing with you. This is a httpd chat server in mod_perl. One uses a browser to chat, no Java or Flash or download. No refresh tag in HTML META, yet, the chatting messages move up quietly in a continuous flow. Chatters can join or leave rooms as registered user or anonymously; they can chat public or private; moderators can kick bad guys etc. In the private chat mode, it functions basically like an IM.
Internally, the browsers pulls the latest messages from the server every 1 second (or 2, configurable), and there is Javascript-to-Perl variable mapping, so the browser can carefully display only the newly added information. It is estimated to be able to serve about 1000 concurrent chatters: 10 rooms with average 100 people in a room. On the backend, there are considerable usages of high topics such as session, memory sharing etc. I feel this is kind of cool :-), well, if you know any one already wrote such an application, let me know. I googled PHP's "chat module", Jabber web chat and etc., so far, this mod_perl application looks way better in both speed and capicity. Some of the ideas may extend to other interesting web applications. E.g. to play chess on a web site --- again, no Java nor Flash, just two remote players with IE. Also, the server can serve not only words but also multimedia content, like a "remote training". Well, just 2 cents. --------------------------------------------------------------------- We have been using mod_perl successfully for several months now as a flexible email proxy -- we just wrapped Net::Server::Mail and with a few additional hacks and it worked. Matt Sergeant did the same thing with qpsmtpd and I have heard that the performance results were initially very promising (http://msgs.securepoint.com/cgi-bin/get/qmail0411/120/1/1/1.html). More details of our hack (patches etc.) are at http://www.mailchannels.com/opensource and http://search.cpan.org/~mock/Apache-SMTP-0.01/lib/Apache/SMTP.pm. IMHO, using mod_perl as a general application server is a great idea. For us there really was no other viable alternative. We looked at POE, Sendmail's milter API, Net::Server and of course qpsmtpd but the reliability, portability, and scalability of Apache was what caused us to go through the effort of making our bits work on mod_perl. To configure a mail server, it's just a matter of adding a VirtualHost section to the Apache configuration et voila. And as packages such as mod_throttle move over to Apache 2, we will gain the wonderment of a solid resource management tool for mail traffic. Joy! TTUL Ken --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
