"Once upon a time there was a reasonably popular web-based chat room called Star Trekker chat. I happened into this chat thanks to a friend and even though Star Trek fans were hardly my favourite group of people I found that for the most part people in there were friendly and fun. But when Star Trekker shut down, thanks to its Perl backend eating server resources for lunch, these happy and kindly people were left with nowhere to go. It was fortunate that at that time I opened my own similar chat room and managed to attract much of the homeless traffic from Trekker. Wary of the resource problems caused by Perl, I was pleased when a friend introduced me to PHP."

"This particular design of web-based chat uses variables posted from a form, processes them into HTML and writes them to a file. Put the form and the message file in a frameset and you have something that looks reasonably like a BeSeen chat room. Of course the advantage is, our chat room can be a little more clever than it's BeSeen cousin."

Complete Story.