What does it take to implement a chat system in Python (Not asking for code just advice before I start my little project)

[Chris Angelico]

On Thu, Jul 18, 2013 at 4:11 PM, Aseem Bansal <asmbansal2 at gmail.com> wrote:
> @vikash agrawal
>
> About GUI I discussed it at https://groups.google.com/forum/#!starred/comp.lang.python/M-Dy2pyWRfM and I am thinking about using PySide 1.2 for clients of chat system. I think I'll need downloadable clients if I want to make something like google talk. Then I'll need to implement server side programming also. I think google app engine would be suitable for this as it is going to be always online.

Hrm. Rather than pointing people to Google Groups, which a number here
(and not unreasonably) detest, you may want to link to the python-list
archive:

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2013-July/thread.html#651359

> About using web frameworks, in the above scenario when there isn't an online website for chat would I need web frameworks? I am confused about this. Can server side programming be done in Python or by using a web framework only?

You can certainly do your server-side programming directly in Python;
in fact, I recommend it for this task. There's no reason to use HTTP,
much less a web framework (which usually consists of a structured way
to build HTML pages, plus a bunch of routing and stuff, none of which
you need). All you need is a simple structure for separating one
message from another. I would recommend either going MUD/TELNET style
and ending each message with a newline, or prefixing each message with
its length in octets. Both ways work very nicely; newline-termination
allows you to use a MUD client for debugging, which I find very
convenient (full disclosure: I am the author of multiple MUD clients,
including one that's zero-dollar and another that's free).

ChrisA