[cgiirc-general] how does it all work?

[Markus S. <ma...@bl...>]

Hi all

I'm looking for a nice web-chat. It's an absolute need to integrate it
in the existing member-login function, which shouldn't be to much of a
problem with CGI-IRC. The other requirement is a clean user-interface.

I would love to have different windows (javascript:window.open()) for
every channel. If possible even for private conversations..  Then the
main (status) window is probably just confusing users (DAUs) - I would
like to remove that.

I do understand perl so I read some of the sources, trying to understand
how CGI-IRC is working. Some questions I didn't quite figure out:

- HTTP is a stateless protocol. Am I right in the assumption, that this
chat simply doesn't close the connection, i.e. continues to send HTML
for the same request during the whole chat? How is the 'scrollback'
option realized then? Can a browser delete content?

- There is a Unix-Socket (server-side) opened. I assume that's for the
connection to the IRC Server. Do different CGI Processes access that?
How does that work? When I send something, I see a request in the apache
log, so that must be another process...

- Would it be possible to run those perl scripts from within mod_perl or
even Mason (perl embedded in HTML, see www.masonhq.com).

- Do you think it's possible to adjust this chat to what I wished above?


Lots of questions... thank you for your time.


Markus