Hi,

We are looking at programming a messenger service that hosts different chat rooms, a buddy list, and allows text, voice, and video. (Kind of like a mix of MSN and Yahoo) but wondering which programming language.

We want an actual windows program with GUI (possibly VB.NET??) not something run off a website.

any suggestions?

Why not try out Java, since it is really good at such things and with the inbuilt excellent GUI support it would be an added advantage ?
Even Python along with one of its graphic toolkits can be used for the purpose.

Also it depends on the kind of experience you have with these languages coz without that such a vast project would remain a pipe dream.

I have some knowledge with Java. We are not worried about how much we know, we are willing to learn a new language if it will better suit the needs of this project. Time is not really important, got plenty of it.


Can you package Java as a regualr .exe program for deployment?

Sorry for double post but it would not let me edit....

How about C#.NET ?? How efective would that be at making this project work. Two of the guys know the basics of C#.

I think you can execute whatever project you want to create with any language, and sice i havent used a lot of C# i dont know the specifics like if it has networking support libraries. But still try reading the documentation and some good tuts on C# and see if they mention something regarding networking and all that.

Do you want this program to work on Macs and Linux? If so, stay away from anything .NET or Windows specific.

I was probably going to develop it just for windows.

If I wanted it to work on Macs/Linux would you suggest going with Java??

Yes Java is supposed to work on all platforms since its portable and compiles the program in byte code which runs on its virtual machine. So as long as the abstraction is present you need not worry.

Ok thanks for the info guys.

I'll look into Java and C#.NET and we will choose which one looks best for our needs.


Thanks again, :)

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