Live Chat Support in rails

I don’t know of any formal libraries but there have been a few implementations thrown around.

Campfire:

  • Page polls every 5 seconds or so to the server for new chats
  • Chats saved on server as XML (I believe), though they could be database entries but that might be slower.

Comet implementation (not a fan of the name, but hey, though this is the more difficult implementation)

  • Use Flash or a Java applet to open a socket to the chat server and do your own communication.

AJAX in Rails makes this kind of app quite easy to make. Check out the available javascript helpers, you’ll find something that will help you.

Jason