I don't care much for online chat. Quite frankly, the conversations seem
superficial compared to email and Web conferencing systems. But writing a chat
server? Now that's a lot more fun. I'm going to show you how to write a little
one-room chat server that, though humble perhaps, has a lot of potential for
expansion.
Coming up with an
algorithm
Prerequisites: You'll need a good working knowledge of Perl and a server with Perl
5.002 or better installed. Note that most ISPs don't allow ordinary users to run
chat servers. You could, however, probably try it out with only a few users over
a modem connection. (Surprisingly enough, this chat server works fine using Perl for
Win32 as long as you get the latest version of IO::Select from CPAN.) You'll also need a telnet
client, because that's what we'll be using as a chat client.
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