OpenChatter
Copyright 2011 Ian Gilham, Liam Dean, William Lord, Greg Bautyonok, Mark Preston
OpenChatter is a simple message board loosely inspired by Twitter.
OpenChatter was built at university as an experiment in getting disparate systems in various scripting languages to work together from either side of the university firewall.
The core technologies are a Javascript based web client and a Python server running on the Google App-Engine. A simple hash-tag feature was implemented later in Perl as a seperate component called via CGI.
Python App
The Python App runs on the App-Engine and includes the main message database as well as user authentication and the core message API.
Authenticated users have the right to post new messages and delete their own posts. There is essentially no moderation.
Perl Script
The Perl script simply mirrors the API of the Python App and searches for hash-tags (#tag) in the returned messages. These are then ordered by popularity and returned to the client.
This is perhaps the simplest form of tagging we could include without and a pretty cool way to extend an application without touching any of its code.
Web Client
The web client consists of a simple web page and some Javascript, which calls functions on the Python and Perl apps, posts messages, and updates the message display in the browser. Message passing is done using JQuery's AJAX functionality.