Forums General Discussion IRC vs php

Hi, I am a total newbie in the IRC world and am just reading everything I can at the moment to learn more about it.

I would really appreciate feedback on this question from any of you with experience in this area; for a simple chat function on a website likely to be used by non-techy types, is there any advantage in using IRC rather than a simple phpchat program already available to install at the click of a button with cPanel?

I look forward to hearing your comments, thanks in advance.

K

IRC is free?

At any rate, if you know how to embed a Java applet in your web pages and how to configure said applets, you could always create a channel somewhere on IRC and then use PJIRC to allow people to connect to it effortlessly via your web page.

Hi Rounin, thanks for that.

So, once the setup is done and there is a simple link from the website for either php or IRC, would you say that using IRC chat is not really very different from phpchat - from a user-end perspective?

K

Not that I've knowingly looked at PHP chat, but looking at Google images of it, it doesn't look much different than a java IRC chat client. That's most likely because IRC is probably the "engine" behind it!

I would suggest that over irc:// links though, as they require an IRC client to be set up 'n stuff.

Regards,

Well if you're looking for an advantage, the main one I could think of is that you could idle in your chatroom easily with mIRC in your system tray and you could configure stuff for your channel through scripts whereas if you just do the php thing you would have to keep a web browser open all the time and you wouldn't be able to do much configuring.