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There are a few benefits to using Prompt Courier instead of AIM, etc. You will have easy access to some features that either aren't available in other systems or are difficult to use. Also, you will have complete ownership of the resources involved in the chat system. This means you can make a closed system that is more free from distraction. You can also modify Prompt Courier so it will perform functions that are specific to your business process. It is also likely that a Prompt Courier client will run more efficiently than the client of a larger system. I hope so. I've done a fair amount of robustness testing to see if there are any errors that will cause the server to crash. You can perform the robustness test by running a command like the one below: java promptcourier.PromptCourierDriver -m robusttest -num-clients 30 --debugThis will start a Prompt Courier server and connect 30 clients to it. Half of these clients will perform an action every second -- either disconnect, reconnect, or send a random message to random recipients. The other half of the clients will send an automatic response to all messages received. Becouse the --debug flag is on, you will see an incomprehensible flurry of activity on your screen. If I had to estimate,
I would say that running this test for an hour is roughly equivalent to running the server for a month in its intended application (a small
office network of 10 users with light use). If you run this test and you get an unexpected crash, please let me know. The test will stop
if any client times out -- this may not be unexpected if you are running too many clients simultaneously for your hardware. Ultimately
I will depend on people using the system normally to determine for sure if it is stable.
Yes and No. Yes, in that running a Prompt Courier server will not open a back door in your network that folks can use to do damage to your system (to my knowledge -- I can't make any promises). No, in that there is no security within the system itself. This means anyone can connect to a server using any username they want. Also, the messages are not encrypted so anyone sniffing on your network can view the messages. To remove the threat of outsiders connecting to your server, make sure the Prompt Courier port (4421 by default) is only accessible from within your network, not from the Internet. I will avoid descending into a discussion about the performance of Java in general. In the case of Prompt Courier, there is little processing involved and the system will spend the vast majority of the time waiting on the network. I don't believe that a non-Java implementation of Prompt Courier would be significantly faster. Prompt Courier is implemented in Java so it will be supported on a wide range of platforms. Java also is very convenient when writing network applications. There are no plans to port Prompt Courier to other platforms because at this time I don't see the need to do so. |