CometChat, a Facebook-style chat script -which enables website users to chat with each other easily- is giving away 2 licenses ($49/each) to WebResourcesDepot readers. Details on "how to join" can be found at the end of the post.

What is CometChat?

It is a PHP / MySQL script for creating a chat environment that can be used while visitors are browsing any page of the website.

Users can select their statuses (like busy, available, invisible or a custom one), "get friends" with each other & see if their friends are online or not.

The interface automatically converts related entries into smileys or well-formatted links & it can notify users with audio messages when a message arrives.

CometChat is multilingual, can be translated to any language & besides the standard icons, new ones can be placed to for a better integration with any website.

The script comes in 2 versions:

• standalone: for  integrating it with your existing social networking, dating or community site
• vBulletin edition: instant integration with this forum software

How To Win The Free Licenses?

You have 2 options to join the giveaway where you can do both of them to increase the chance of winning:

• comment to this post with at least "I want the license" text besides any other comment
• ReTweet this message at Twitter: Facebook-Style Chat Application: CometChat (http://www.cometchat.com/) (2 Licenses Giveaway): http://tr.im/r2sU (via @umutm) (click the link to ReTweet easily).

Winners will be selected randomly on 13th July 2009 (1 week later & they can choose whether they want to get the standalone or the vBulletin edition.

Good luck to all.

toksta* is a free instant messenger with text & webcam based chat support.

It is a hosted application that can be integrated to your website & user database. With this feature, your users won’t have to re-login to the messenger. 

toksta* also provides plug-ins for phpBB2, phpBB3, punBB, phpMyForum and vBulletin.

toksta* lets you customize the design via an easy to use configurator & you can upload your logo to the application.

Another nice feature is the revenue sharing. The revenue of ads that are shown during the chat is shared between the site owner & toksta*.

Besides these, toksta* has unlimited parallel chats, automatic webcam detection, buddy list integration supoort & more. Click here to see all the features.

firefly is a totally different chat system which can power your websites.

By adding a line of JavaScript, your visitors can chat with each other in an overlayed screen.

Users can:

• See other users mouse movements,
• Choose avatars,
• See the chat history,
• Howmany people are already in the page.

As a developer, all I can ask for more is an API that enables integrating any userbase to the system for adding auto avatars, names to the users etc. Considering this is a fresh chat service, in the future, why not?

You should definitely give firefly a try & will probably be impressed.

Mia Chat is an Ajaxed PHP chat application which is very simple to use & install.

It functions similar to the messenger applications, you can add buddies, chat with several users at the same time, change your online status & more.

This PHP chat supports many databases for storing data like MySQL, MSSQL, Oracle 8+, MS SQL Server 2000+, SQLite 2+ and PostgreSQL 7+.

JibberBook is an open source Ajaxed guestbook application built with PHP5.

It stores the data in a XML file (optional MySQL support) and provides an easy to use interface.

For security, JibberBook uses:

• HTML Purifier (see WRD post) for filtering inputs against XSS attacks.
• Akismet for spam protection so users won’t need to enter captcha information.

This PHP guestbook application uses Mootools and it is unobtrusive (it will work even if the JavaScript is disabled).

wTag is a shoutbox script (mini chat) written in PHP which uses Ajax to refresh the chat.

It uses MySQL to store the data, has a CSS-based smiley dropdown which can be enabled/disabled and a bad words & spam filter.

Other features of this PHP shoutbox script are:

• Replace URLs catched in a message with clickable links.
• UTF-8 encoding for multilingual support.
• Compliance with XHTML 1.0 Transitional and CSS.
• Custom designs: it’s easy to change the chatbox look by editing the CSS files.
• A form validation and warnings display system.

AJAX Chat is a powerful, open source, fully customizable web chat software built with JavaScript, PHP and MySQL.

AJAX Chat supports voice chat that is powered by Flash & Ruby (sound support is optional).

This free AJAX chat software integrates easily with PHP community softwares like phpBB, MyBB, PunBB, SMF, vBulletin and sample integrations are provided with the software.

Some beautiful features include

• Multilanguage support
• Multiple channels
• Private messaging
• Private channels
• Invitation system
• Kick or ban offending users
• Online users list with user menu
• Emoticons / Smilies
• Flood control
• Possibility to delete messages inside the chat
• IRC style commands
• Possibility to define opening hours for the chat
• Possibility to enable/disable guest users
• Template system
• Standards compliance (XHTML 1.0 strict)
• Realtime monitoring and logs viewer
• Easy integration into existing authentication systems
• Well commented source code

Ajax Chat is developed with security in mind and it is strong against code injections, SQL injections, cross-site scripting (XSS), session stealing and other attacks.

ajax im is an ajax chat script that creates a real-time chat environment with a browser based interface.

It can be added to any intranet, website or a social-community project to help users chat with each other. Chat interface does not reload as everything is updated in real-time via JavaScript.

ajax im is also a multilingual script and language files can be found in the script website.

How ajax im works?

The XMLHTTPRequest object allows HTTP requests to be sent to the server and get input back from the server. There are two parts to the client-server interaction through this object:

• The client "pings" the server (a PHP script) for new messages. The server in turn queries a database for any messages for the client, and returns them as JSON. The XMLHTTPRequest object passes this JSON text be parsed by the rest of the JavaScript.
• The client sends data to the server (a PHP script), such as a new message to another user. This data is then processed by the server ("cleaning" the data of any thing invalid) and put into the database, which is later "pinged" by another client.