Yours truly has done it again! Instead of finally getting to writing about Analog Clock I created another Morfik Labs sample application, a simple chat thingy.

You can take a look at the application here and download the source code in the Morfik Labs.

Telling the truth, I created the original chat app almost a year ago (February, 2006) and now due to interest in the Morfik forums I dusted it off and updated to the latest version of Morfik WebOS AppsBuilder (0.9.16.1). I thought originally it would be a two-three hours exercise, and man I was wrong! It took me two days to tidy up a few hundred lines of code :-) The reason was that the original version used subforms for displaying the messages, but that was tooo sloooow, so I decided to wander a little bit into the wonderland of DOM programming.

So some details (shamelessly copied form the readme.txt): the Basic Chat example application is the innermost prototypical core of a chat engine and still it can provide some insight into areas of Morfik programming. A few examples:

- using web methods
- using inline JavaScript functions with parameters
- using critical sections in server logic to accommodate concurrency
- using in-memory caching on the server (the chat session is stored in server memory)
- using visual effects for highlighting UI changes
- no security measures: a very good example for many types of web application security attacks, especially injections :-)

PLEASE NOTE: this version of the chat engine is NOT secured, there are gaping holes and can be mistreated quite easily, so DO NOT use it for production purposes. It is very basic as well, you cannot set up chat rooms, or schedule events, authenticate users, there is no smiley handling, there are no application specific extensions, etc. Please also note that at the moment there are some open issues related to resource consumption in the Morfik framework that do affect the performance of the chat app. It has not been overly optimized either so substantial performance improvements can still be achieved.

If you need a production quality, secure chat engine, please contact me ;-).