Forum OpenACS Q&A: Response to Is someone interested in the ACS 4.x Java Chat Module for openacs 3.2.x?

Hey David.

That's more interesting stuff....  I'm especially curious about the HTTP tunneling.

The issue of traversing corporate firewalls is unfamiliar to me, so let me see if I have this straight.  As I understand it, the firewall restricts traffic to familiar ports with one or more specific protocols associated with each open port.  So to get stuff in and out of port 80, it needs to be http?  Is this what is meant when people say they can't use java because they're behind a firewall?

The issue that comes to mind is that you can only have one service listening on a given port.  So if you have AOLserver listening on port 80, to my knowledge you can't share that port with a chat server.  Does that mean you would run the chat server on port 80 on another IP address?  Or would the chat server, or some kind of http tunneling middleware, be the service listening on port 80, brokering the requests and routing them to the appropriate web/chat server?

I'm kind of thinking out loud here, trying to understand this stuff, but if you have an answer I'd be interested.