Web Developer Musings

Over the last week I have been working on a small project called with the highly imaginative working title 'Chat'. This is a simple (but totally modern) chat room I aim to release as an Open Source product that can stand-alone or be worked into an existing website.

I started 'Chat' to learn, experiment and refine various web development technologies. Most importantly for me it is based on PHP 5.2 and is neatly arranged into a single class. I have found stepping up to a more recent version of PHP really stands out when manipulating files for the self-installer as it has created a more streamlined process, and hopefully using a single class it will make the program secure while also being an easy platform for developers to work with.

This is also the first time I have built a program specifically with AJAX functionality in mind. Actions such as posting a message and logging in are all controlled in a simple file that is able to work individually so it can be called directly by Javascript. As it turns out sending form data and pulling content from a database is not nearly as difficult as I had imagined, requiring less than 1KB of - admittedly of fairly obtuse - code, and by starting the Javascript last 'Chat' should degrade neatly if anything goes wrong. This is also the first time I have written any code to work with JSON which isn't exactly exciting or interesting but should be useful for me in the future.

Lastly and least importantly the default template of 'Chat' uses CSS3 for rounded corners, drop shadows and zebra striping.

I hope to start up a project page soon (I'm not sure whether to use Google Code, GitHub or Sourceforge - any thoughts?).