Over the last week or so, I've been working on some technology that allows a web page to display a real-time chat box. The code is still in an early test phase, but it's at a point where I need to do some stability testing. Therefore, there's now a very simple chat on the Blackbox activation page. The purpose of this test is to see how the server side components function over time, so simply keep on doing what you've been doing, and feel free to say hello in the new little chat box.

For those of you who are interested in the technology behind this feature, I'll give you a quick overview. If you're not interested, you can simply skip the rest of this post :)

On the front end (the browser), there is a socket.io component that connects to a node.js service. This service does very simple message passing between the connected people. In addition to this, messages are sent to another node.js service (using ZeroMQ as a transport) which is acting as an IRC server and connects to the FumbblNet IRC network (ie, the FUMBBL IRC server), and allows people on the web site to chat directly with the people on the IRC server.

There's still a fair amount of work needed to finalise this code but I'm hoping it'll be useful to you all as it stands. I am also planning to get a similar chat box displayed on the Gamefinder, but that requires a fair amount of UI work on that page. Also note that the service may be unstable and may stop working at any time.

Either way, enjoy and let me know what you think.