Well I can't quite believe that it's taken almost a whole year, but I finally found the time to finish off that Ajax Chat app that I started last October! Yes it's hard to believe, but refitting a bathroom, building a sponge and even doing work all have to take priority over the writing of a little hobby project.

Excuses aside (especially that one about sponge building), it's done! And online. And you can play with the finished result here.

I think it manages to cover everything I set out to do, with some embellishments I couldn't resist adding:

Yes I know! Automatic "smilification" and "linkification"! Exciting!

I use custom PHP and a very simple MySQL database at the back end. This is driven by the custom Javascript on top of (a very old version of) the Prototype library on the client. I use JSON for all the server responses (with an appropriate content type) that gets eval'ed into a data structure on the client side. It works for me on Firefox, IE, Opera and Konqueror. There are some issues with focusing the form fields in Opera that could be ironed out, but it's taken a year to get here so don't count on it.

The javascript itself isn't optimised for size at all, so it should be relatively readable.

Any problems, please do let me know. Although I doubt I'll have much time to fix anything. Maybe in another year or so?