I am working on an application that requires message stacking similar to that of Gmail's 'conversations'. I am tossing around different approaches to this issue. I have yet to come up with anything that I like.

I tend to over complicate things, so I was wondering if anyone cared to offer up possible approaches to this?

I don't understand what you mean by "message stacking similar to that of Gmail's conversations" - Can you provide a screen shot?

do you mean (creating a pop server?) or (imitating gmail server making it look like if you sent an email from gmail)

Hmm...Perhaps that is why I haven't had any replies, lol.

Gmail gives you the ability to chat with other Gmail users directly from your Gmail account. No 3rd party software is required, it's all web-based.

By 'stacking', I simply mean the way they group these chats/conversations. They group the conversations you have with other users with timestamps, etc.

Maybe 'chat logging' is a better way to put it.

Recently Gmail started offering the ability to have multiple users in one conversation. I'm not worried about that. I just need to handle 1 to 1 chatting.

I think this may still be unclear, but feel free to take a shot at what you think I'm talking about O_o I'll hopefully be able to clear it up some more.

Thanks!

Chris

It sounds like you're talking about a chat system and are throwing in Google b/c you like their presentation of it. There are 2 options I choose from when doing this:

1) Log the chat to a database.
2) Log the chat to a file.

I do #2 when the file is regularly deleted and I don't need to query it for details. I do #1 when I want the log of chats saved and may want to query it for deeper analysis. Presentation is a whole other matter. For that, I use Ajax.

Thanks for your reply, Jeremy!

I'm not concerned about the aesthetics at all.

I can easily log every message that is sent and received, and I will be using AJAX for 'real time' chatting.

My dilemma is this:

How should I group the messages into conversations ( like Gmail )?

What will mark the beginning and end of a conversation?

etc, etc.

There are many ways all of this can be done. I am just trying to decide on the best way.

I was thinking about giving each chat a lifespan when it is first initialized, and possibly resetting the lifespan each time a new message is sent or received.

I'm not sure why I am having such a difficult time wording my problem =x

Thanks again for your help!

OK. Sounds to me like your dilemma is determining when a conversation has ended. To solve that, you have to be a bit sneaky as you can't, using just ajax, maintain a persistent connection. If you code the JS so that every X seconds, it pings the server for new messages, then you will be able to update the chat if there are new message and if all members of the chat have not pinged back to see for new messages in that X seconds, then the session could be killed. You could enforce that through mathematical analysis or a cron. To do this you'd have to log the datetime of the ping backs in addition to the chat. So that your logs don't get astronomically large, you may want to setup a table which contains the members and last checked-in time in addition to a table which contains the messages (otherwise you'd be storing every check-in time and that'd be more than you care to store.)

Hope that helps.

The only plausible solution that I have come up with so far is similar to yours. That's what I meant by a 'lifespan'.

Each conversation would get a lifespan of say, 30 minutes or so. That means if no action ( send or receive ) has happened within the lifespan, the conversation is terminated. I was thinking of simply setting the conversation end time, each time a new action takes place.

# when a message is sent or received
$end_time = $lifespan + $now;

# when i check for new messages
If ( $end_time <= $now )
{
# terminate convo
}

That is all I can come up with, and I'm not too happy with it =x

What's wrong with the logic? I'd enforce that through the db or a file, not sessions, but otherwise I see nothing questionable about it.

bleh. You're right. I thought about it some more and came up with a pretty good variation of my previous plan. I will post back when everything is finished and let you know exactly what I decided on.

Thanks for your suggestions!