It all started when we used Slicehost’s chat-room for their support : not only it’s awesome to have 24/7 support, but it’s also great to have a short-message interface that allows real-time discussion and interaction.
Unfortunately, Campfire is “proprietary” software and it doesn’t seem to be XMPP based. XMPP is known as THE instant messaging protocol, and it has the fairly well defined and complete Multi User Chat Extension .
Also, XMPP has Bosh, which allows transportation of XMPP stanzas over HTTP. From that, there is no reason to think we couldn’t do a Web Based Multi User Chat, with just 1 HTML page, and 1 Javascript and that could be integrated in any web framework in just a few seconds : meet Aristochat.
The great thing about Aristochat is that it’s just a MUC client, which means that you can connect (and manage) to the room as well from your favorite XMPP client (like Psi Gajim or Adium).
Check the Superfeer chat to see an example. And, yes, Aristochat is OSS, so you can fork, fetch and push it back with more features!
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