Friendlier web interface, /share is back, and more

Here's some recent changes that I've made to Partychat:

• Make the homepage friendlier (and slightly prettier), especially the room creation form.
• Improve web-based room management (building on what David started), so that you can join, leave, or request an invitation from the room's web page (here's a sample room for the current developers).
• Prettify the plusplusbot display in the web UI.
• Add a /share command that makes it easy to share URLs and give some context.
• Clean up some data layer issues and fix some inconsistencies.
• And of course, quite a few bug fixes (nothing like scanning the AppEngine logs looking for NPEs).

There's also been some recent production issues that have kept me busy. For example, yesterday a user invited room A as a member of room B, and vice-versa. As an unintentional side-effect of a change that I made to make the setup process more user-friendly, it became very easy to set off an infinite loop of messages. By the time I realized what was going on, we'd run out of App Engine bandwidth quota. Thankfully after some budget rejiggering and a some quick code change all was well. Similarly, a couple of weeks ago we had CPU usage issues (though optimizing that away was still fun).

It seems like chat is gaining in trendyness, with HipChat launching recently (presumably to challenge the incumbent Campfire) and Brizzly/Thing Labs's Picnics happening. Partychat will probably remain a hobby/fit-within-AppEngine-free-quota sort of project indefinitely, but it's been fun polishing it (and of coure, there's still quite a few things left to fix).

Semi-cross-posted from Mihai's blog.

Partychapp not responding to messages

Partychapp appears online, but is not responding to messages. We're not sure why, but we're assuming it's an issue with AppEngine. Will investigate

Update: Back to normal - issues were due to http://code.google.com/status/appengine

Back to the Beta

Marty McFly: Doc, we better back up. We don't have enough road to get up to 88.
Dr. Emmett Brown: Roads? Where we're going we don't need roads.

I'm happy to announce the first major step towards a more reliable, stable, and feature-rich Partychat: Partychapp β.

For the past few weeks, a rogue group of friends have been dedicating their spare time to porting PartyChat over to Google AppEngine. We'd talked about doing this for a long time, but the recently added XMPP support was the missing piece needed to make the whole thing run.

As with the old Partychat, Partychapp is open source and you can track its development through the associated Google Code feeds.

What makes Partychapp better? 95% of Partychat's issues were the result of our Jabber connection -- rate limiting, federation issues, etc. Because Partychapp uses AppEngine's XMPP bridge, jabber connectivity is vastly improved with Partychapp. And those remaining 5% of issues with Partychat? They generally had to do with data persistence, which again AppEngine deals with much more effectively.

Why beta? There are a number of features missing and bugs we need to fix. To track them (and add more!) see: Partychapp Issues. Also AppEngine XMPP doesn't (yet) support custom domains so we can't move partych.at over.

So check out Partychapp β. Instructions on how to set up a room (including a web-based invites system!) can be found at http://partychapp.appspot.com/.

Big, giant, overwhelming thanks go out to Neil, Jason, Kushal, and David who are the people responsible for making Partychapp happen. A special shout out to mpd who added XMPP support to AppEngine, making this all possible.