i made a program that tons of people use that is made with a webbrowser control, and everyone is asking for a chat. i wanted to go with sockets, but since im on router i cant get anybody to connect to me, so i was thinking about irc, but i have no idea where to start...i kjust wanted your guyses input on the best and easiest way to go about multi user chats., also i need to be able to boot people, just me though.

I dont suppose you have access to the router and you could just forward a port or two? That would be the easy way, then just implement a simple socket chat system. If you dont, second option would be to write a proxy server and stick it somewhere else.

Personally, I'd stay away from IRC. Its a protocol that you would have to implement, which if you haven't done before could get very messy.

As a third alternative though, there is always the option of using PHP and SQL (mySQL or postgresql or whatever is availible). A good number of cheap hosting packages come with these options now. With PHP, you could use simple HTTP URL get/post variables and update during a simple iteration of your application. This is probably the easiest way out of all of them, and completely removes most sockets programing from the picture. But, it comes down to how well your application could handle this type of action. If it's .Net, then the objects are there to use (I just can't remember offhand what they are called).


(Just a note, but I dont see how this is multi-threaded? That generally implies a program with multiple threads in it, which you really dont need for a multiuser chat server)

Hope this helps!

google for jive messenger
xmpp protoccol
open source
yahoo

aim would be cool, ive seen some using its engine oscar or w/e seems pretty cool though