BluePrint: Chat

Introduction

We want to be able to provide the ability for users to be able to message each other in real-time.

This is useful for compliance reasons as well as just convenience.

Description

• Provide a chat board through which users can help each other or get help from the system administrator.
• Perhaps have one chat for each organization or project.

Requirements

• Ability to show which users are online

Advanced

• Easily switch to the user's email / SMS / Phone to contact them if they are not available by chat
  • candy plugin which links to Eden's msg.compose()
• Status Updates
  • candy plugin?
• History
  • Store chat history in DB (per-room & per user<>user private chat with appropriate permissions).
  • Scheduled task to prune.
  • Allow access to view this history from within the client 1 day/1week/1month/3months.
  • User can override archiving.
• VoIP
  • Single-user
  • Multi-user
• Video
• Whiteboard
• Screen Sharing
• File Transfer
  • candy plugin to expose ejabberd's capabilities?

Design

• Simple option is to provide a preconfigured IRC client, but this may not be good for scalability
  • e.g. ​qwebirc was used for SandyRelief and there is some code to have this display in a side-pane to the main browser window
• Scalable option would to provide an XMPP client (e.g. to a Jabber server)

Server

• ​ejabberd
• ​OpenFire

Client

• ​http://candy-chat.github.io/candy/
  • Needs updating to work with current jQuery/UI
  • Add Authentication: Users are who they say they are & are only allowed into the correct rooms.
  • Add Notifications hook.
  • Add Offline Users.
  • Pull-in profile pictures.
  • Add "User is typing"
  • Add Recent Messages at Top
• ​http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1081634/which-is-the-most-mature-python-xmpp-library-for-a-gchat-client
• ​http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/wiki/TwistedWords
  • ​http://wokkel.ik.nu
• ​https://github.com/Jajcus/pyxmpp2
• ​http://xmpppy.sourceforge.net (unmaintained)

VoIP

Assuming single-user:

• ​http://mumble.sourceforge.net
• Flash client included in ​http://frug.github.io/AJAX-Chat/

Implementation

<Leave open for a list of implementation>

References

<Links to external resources>

---

BluePrints