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Live Chat Solution

Posted: Tue Jun 12, 2007 11:21 am
by acidHL
Hi Guys,

My apologies if this isn't the suitable forum to post this...

A client of ours (an IT consultancy) is interested in a live online chat solution for their support staff, an application like Liveperson or InstantService.
The problem we have is that the client has some specific requirements including the need to save transcripts and messages into their own, bespoke, internal support tracking system. I cannot find an existing product that would be flexible enough to do this, nor can I find any decent open source solutions we could modify.

So we're now considering quoting for the development of a bespoke system.
We're currently looking at writing it in Java or in PHP & Javascript using AJAX/XmlHttpRequest. These are the skills we have in-house but we are concerned that the length of time spent developing a Java solution might push up the development costs.

If we went with the latter PHP based option i'm concerned about the load all the repeated HTTP/PHP/MySQL hits would put on a shared server environment. The company would probably have no more than 10 "operators" on at a time but may need to scale up. Does anybody have any experience as to how well a LAMP environment will hold up to repeated requests of this sort (each one needing to write to the database etc) - at what point do you think would it start to affect other clients on the server?

Posted: Tue Jun 12, 2007 11:37 am
by superdezign
WTMI. :-p

Have you looked into Campfire? Seems suitable for most cases.

Posted: Wed Jun 13, 2007 3:17 am
by acidHL
Impressive application but i'm not sure it solves the problem of integrating it with our client's database system.