[thelist] Chatbox using ASP?

[Eveline Vanhemel]

Hi all,

I am trying to make a chatbox for a site I am working on. I know most of the
online chatboxes are java applets. Because I am not into Java programming, I
promised my client to try to come up with something else, when they asked me
if it would be possible, I had some vague idea how I could pull this off in
ASP.

This was my way of thinking, for the elementary part of my script:

Create a frameset consisting out of two frames, one with a textarea element
in it where people can type in their comments, the second part, the
topframe, is a page created by a textstream object with the comment embedded
in it. This works to a certain extend but I was already aware of one major
problem, since the page created by the textstream object is part of the
frameset, it never gets loaded, so it never refreshes, so I thought of
putting a META refresh tag on the page, so it refreshes every 10 seconds. I
am pretty much sure, this isn't the best way to do this, and my first
question to you was how I could do this in a better way.

Up till just now, I encountered another problem and this already rules out
my previous question. Refreshing is never good because when the page
refreshes it always jumps back to the top of the page and that is something
that can't be anyway because when the text gets larger then my page size and
someone adds to the textstream object, it jumps back to the top of the page
and you can't even read what you have added without scrolling.

This thing lets me think, I already started out wrong by thinking, I could
create a chatbox this way. Because of that, my question to you is, is there
a way to create a chatbox without using Java? Or should I prepare my client
that he better forgets the idea?

The site is running on a NT Server and I use a mixture of VBScript and
JavaScript for client-side scripting and ASP for server-side scripting.

Any suggestions are very welcome.

Thanks in advance,

Eveline Vanhemel
webdeveloper