Hello
This is a question about ways to improve the chat module in OpenAcs
3.2.5. We know there has not been much development in this area
because IM clients like Jabber are recommended, but in many cases
people cannot use them (e.g. because of firewalls or other
restrictions.) A simple and reliable, user friendly chat module is
what we need. We have experienced that for most users the JavaScript
version works best. Still we want to improve some features, like
userfriendliness and speed.
We want to use Aolserver's cache to serve content, and we want to
serve as little information as possible, in order to reduce network
traffic.
The questions are:
1. How to define the cache size?
In [pageroot]/tcl/ad-utilities.tcl.preload the following lines exist:
# Pre-declare the cache arrays used in
util_memoize. nsv_set util_memoize_cache_value .
"" nsv_set
util_memoize_cache_timestamp . ""
What kind of value should we use? Is this in bytes?
In:
proc_doc util_memoize {tcl_statement
{oldest_acceptable_value_in_seconds "60"}}
we use as you can see 60 seconds, because it is just chat 😊
2. The next thing is the layout and behavior of the javascript window.
We want the space for text to be bigger, and we want to define the
"enter" key as the way to insert a message. (No need to use a mouse
when chatting, or optional. Most users use tab-enter at the moment,
but this is tedious.) How can this be done in JavaScript (shouldn't be
too difficult eh?).
3. A next thing could be a way to reduce the number of messages in the
javascript window, i.e. only the last 5 or 10 messages should be
served. This reduces network load. (Users can always read all messages
in "history".
Thanks for your suggestions, it would be nice if someone with
knowledge of javascript could help us because we cannot do that
ourselves.
Hans and Ben (www.klessebes.nl)
