PluginChat is client-server chat software for web sites and intranets. It provides an easy and inexpensive way for you to do the following:

• Start your own chat community, thus increasing the number of returning visitors as well as attracting new ones.
• Conduct online meetings or conferences, thus saving lots of time.
• Provide your customers with live support and real-time consulting.

The server part is a Java™ program that runs as a daemon in the background on a physical server machine and listens for incoming client connections. The server can run on any Java-enabled operating system.

The client part is a Java applet which can be embedded on a web page and can be accessed with any Java  enabled browser, such as Netscape Communicator™ 4.08 or newer or Internet Explorer 4.0 or newer.

The PluginChat Project is client-server based chat software that can be used in personal networks or in the Internet. It supports multiple virtual servers, multiple rooms, users, administrative support and many more features.

This software is divided into a server that can run as a background service as well as console application. Another part is the chat client which is a Java applet and can be accessed through any Java enabled web browser. Both client and server require Java Runtime Environment 5 (1.5) installed.

Both server and the client are tested in Windows 98/ME/NT/2000/XP/2003. P-II 400 MHz processor, 64 MB RAM is enough.

The client applet requires any Java enabled web browser like Internet Explorer / Netscape Navigator etc.

Both server and client require Java Runtime Environment 5 (1.5) installed.

You must keep the server and the client files in same machine but you can access the client web pages from another machine using http protocol. In that case any http server software like Internet Information Service (IIS), Apache etc is useful for accessing the client web page that contains the client applet from remote machine.

If any proxy server / firewall is monitoring your network then make sure that you can access the remote server machine using http protocol because that client connects to the server through http protocol.

Windows NT/2000/XP/2003 is recommended for running the server because these operating systems support background service. For Windows 98/ME you have to run the server from the console.

The PluginChat Project has an installer program. Execute it and follow the instructions. For Windows NT/2000/XP/2003 it automatically installs the server as a background service and starts it. You can also start/stop the server from the program menu group or from windows service manager.

The client files are also copied in the installation directory. The client files are also available as a separate zip file. Someone can use it to keep the client files separate from the server files.

For Windows 98/ME you have to manually start the server from console. It can be done by selecting the “Test Server” menu or by running the “test.bat” batch file into the “SrvBin” directory inside the server installation root directory.

After the server started successfully access the “Index.html” web page located in the client root directory. You must access this file using http protocol. To do that, make an alias of the client root directory. Like if you are running both client and server in the same machine then if you have made alias named “chat” for the client root directory that you can run the client by opening web browser and typing http://localhost/chat/index.html.

(When installing the server the client files are also copied in the installation directory. So you can use the server root directory as client root directory instead of extracting the separately available client zip file in a separate directory).

These are “Server.xml” and “Client.xml” files for the server and client respectively.

The main configuration tag is “ServerPort”.

There are several other configuration tags. Another important tag is the “ServerIP” tag in the configuration file of the server.