integrate *own* ruby on rails chat application, is there a gem for that?

rubyonrails-talk
1

So, I abhor using 3rd party API's personally, as it creates extra dependencies *and* extra possible points of failure for our business.

As a result, no, we're not going to use meebo, etc, or similar (they spammed us WAY too many times, as well, trying to sell us their stuff).

Is there a gem for integrated chat into an RoR application? We build a private messaging system we call fun mail ~3+ years ago, which works great...but, we "lose" people who then move off site to have convo's in real time...if we could bundle in chat, we'd keep them on site longer, and it'd be a more seamless experience (also, if the person that joins the convo goes creepy, they can block them on our site, and they don't feel violated, eg, having just given their email out to somebody who went pervy...it's happened.)

Any suggestions are very much appreciated.

2

Not that I know of, however I've built something very similar at work and we were planning on open sourcing the underlying technology in the near future.

Fred

3

Whereas rolling your own takes much more development time and -- often -- doesn't work as well. There's certainly a tradeoff involved, but I'm not sure that an "abhorrence" of 3rd-party APIs is always reasonable. (I would *not* want to write my own JavaScript mapping service...)

My one experience with building a chat application didn't go that well (that was with PHP, Fusebox, and Mootools, not Rails). It's a lot harder than it looks...

Best,