I want to implement a chat system for my site. The functionality will be very similar to facebook chat. The chats will be one to one based.
I know how to build the chat system using PHP, MySql and using JQuery. But my concern is that it won’t scale to large number of users in the long term.
Using JQuery I would be making requests every second to keep the chat window updated or if the user is sending a request to chat with another user. This will cause extra load on the server as the user base will increase overtime.
I’ve been told using PHP for this is not a ideal solution, that I should look into comet programming, which I never tried before.
My question is that are there any pre-build frameworks out there that I could use, or a better approach of building it?
I heard of NodeJs and APE but these are not supported by my server.
Thanks guys.
EDIT: after having word with my server guys, i might change my OS so i can run NodeJS. How good is nodejs is term of scalability and will it meet my needs?