OT: Chat server

[Hung Jung Lu]

"Miki Tebeka" <miki.tebeka at zoran.com> wrote:
> I'm looking for a chat (IRC) server.
> Nothing fancy. It has to be free, standalone and with logging.
> Python based will be ideal.

If you are serious about long term, you should probably use Jabber
instead.

http://www.jabber.org/

On the server side, there are a few free servers. You can save the
logs. Unfortunately, there are not Python based. There is one simple
Python client. It usually is not difficult to tweak clients to suit
your needs.

A universal protocol is much more important than the programming
language, in the long run. So Jabber might be good. Nonetheless, one
thing I don't like about the Jabber community is that there is not
much coordination in centralizing efforts, you see quite a bit of
chaos. Jabber has a tremendous potential of becoming the de-facto
standard for cluster computing communication, but most of the
developers keep this dream of popularizing it to replace
AOL/Microsoft/Yahoo messenger, or dreaming about all corporates using
Jabber for instant messaging, which is totally unrealistic in the
comming years, if ever. As for developers that want to use Jabber for
cluster computing, there are no good/organized introductory tutorials,
no good help manuals like Python. Jabber has been around for quite a
while, but I guess lack of organization skills, and unrealistic dream
of popularizing IM, is what has lead to its primitive state for
developers. Yes, there are two books out there, but I've been told
they are not good. There are thousands of Jabber developers out there,
but somehow the lack of centralization means a lot of efforts are
being wasted, and each person has his own little website, hundreds of
low-quality clients that are useless for developers, and near total
lack of usable documentation.

I guess the chaos has a bit to do with Unix background of many people
there. In the Windows world, people are used to the
"click-click-click-done" philosophy, so they think about
user-friendliness issues much more. In Unix world, when they say they
are done with a software product, it actually means that you have to
pull this library from here, download that virtual machine from that
website, go and edit some paths and config files, cross your fingers
and pray, download more libraries, repeat the process all over again a
few times. With that kind of mentality, it is no surprise to see chaos
and wasted efforts all over.

regards,

Hung Jung