Status of chat server
Submitted by on Friday, 12 October, 2001 - 20:20
The situation differs among the major browsers. Internet Explorer, even as recently as version 6.0, will work with self-signed certificates under Microsoft's JVM. However, Netscape, Mozilla and other browsers using Sun's Java Plugin-In have stricter security requirements. Beginning with JDK 1.3.1, a security certificate will not work without a valid root Certificate Authority. It appears there is no way to circumvent this requirement, even if the user were willing to run an untrusted applet plugin. Since an IRC applet on the jEdit Community site would have to access the Internet to communicate with an IRC server, security limitations are triggered.
It is hard to justify a chat applet for users of only one browser. Philosophically I would not be in favor of installing proprietary software, like the jIRC applet offered on a single-site license basis by JPilot, that provides its own certificate. Unless anyone has a suggestion for an alternative, I don't see a solution that does not involve a major coding project.
For your general information, I will report on my evaluation of two Open Source IRC Java packages that can be run as either applets or applications.
The Eteria IRC Client ("EIRC") has a relatively sophisticated interface, including color text display, multiple panes for simultaneous channel activity and separate frame windows for disaplying channel lists. The jar download, even without Swing classes, is about 140KB, and the package's substitute for a JTree control does not work well with large datasets such as the listing of all channels on irc.openprojects.net.
The other package, Jicra, is a simple, one-channel client that is extremely lightweight; the applet download is under 20KB. It does not implement IRC commands from the user's message line, although it does provide a user listing panel and allows private messages. The features of EIRC are attractive, but Jicra would get my vote for a dedicated support chat channel in view of its size. It is also the basis for jEdit's IRC plugin, so any further customization could be leveraged. Because of the security issue, unfortunately, the choice is academic for the present.
It is hard to justify a chat applet for users of only one browser. Philosophically I would not be in favor of installing proprietary software, like the jIRC applet offered on a single-site license basis by JPilot, that provides its own certificate. Unless anyone has a suggestion for an alternative, I don't see a solution that does not involve a major coding project.
For your general information, I will report on my evaluation of two Open Source IRC Java packages that can be run as either applets or applications.
The Eteria IRC Client ("EIRC") has a relatively sophisticated interface, including color text display, multiple panes for simultaneous channel activity and separate frame windows for disaplying channel lists. The jar download, even without Swing classes, is about 140KB, and the package's substitute for a JTree control does not work well with large datasets such as the listing of all channels on irc.openprojects.net.
The other package, Jicra, is a simple, one-channel client that is extremely lightweight; the applet download is under 20KB. It does not implement IRC commands from the user's message line, although it does provide a user listing panel and allows private messages. The features of EIRC are attractive, but Jicra would get my vote for a dedicated support chat channel in view of its size. It is also the basis for jEdit's IRC plugin, so any further customization could be leveraged. Because of the security issue, unfortunately, the choice is academic for the present.
