So it turned out to be easy enough to build an AJAX chat module that I've gone ahead and built one.  I'll plug it in once I've finished a couple of more features and tested it all. The basic chat works fine right now. But chat isn't much fun without rooms - so I made sure it would support multiple rooms. Right now it'll chat in multiple rooms, but the missing ingredient is room presence - to answer the question "how many people are here right now?". That brings up the issue of private rooms, because some conversations are best done behind closed doors. The reason that's an issue with room presence is because if you've got room presence, you've got to know which rooms not to show. Yada, yada, yada. Feature creep. Maybe I should just open one public room and be done with it, but that's hardly intellectually inspiring. 

After some long thought about the systems issues, I think I've got a novel concept. Since there are to be multiple rooms, who gets to create a room? Just the admin? Logged in users? On most sites you have to suggest a new room name and wait a few days/weeks or else they are created for you based on marketing research. 

As it turns out, in my implementation as it exists right now a room is nothing more than a tag on a message. Maybe that's all it should be. You want a room called 'Lesbian Buddhist secret agents from Norway'? Fine by me. All you have to do is go to a room by that name - and that act alone makes it exist. Rooms cease to exist when all their messages expire. This is actually pretty cool from an administration viewpoint. Rooms appear magically as they're needed, and they vanish when they stop being used.

Zero maintenance.

It's probably more of an academic exercise than anything else. There aren't enough people that actually hang out at the BADDCAFE to be much use here. Then again, I wasn't expecting 60,000 visitors the other day, and social communications ware is the kind of software I've always enjoyed doing. AJAX chat fits nicely into the portfolio and looks good on the resume if nothing else.