Chapter 1. Introduction

Table of Contents
What is Mazen's PHP Chat?
What is new in V3
Features

What is Mazen's PHP Chat?

Mazen's PHP Chat is a Chatsystem completely written in PHP and JavaScript. Other than Till Gerken's PHPChat, it doesn't need an IRC server to handle all incoming and outgoing chatmessages. Likewise, it doesn't use HTTP-Meta Refreshes to update its Chatmessages. It establishes a perpetual stream of data to the client browser, and so the user will not have the ugly flickering of his browser window. It works with every 4th generation Browser which supports JavaScript, and was tested with IE 5/6, Netscape 4/6, Mozilla and others. Due to an own Server, the Chat doesn't consume much memory. Some performance tests brought a result, that about 50 Chatters just consume about 5 megabytes of Memory, and a cpu load lower than 1%, so that it won't be a big problem to build high-traffic Chats.