Setup a basic live-chat area on website.

[coldscooter]

Hi, I want to create an area on my site so that users can chat live to a representative in my office.

I'm wondering if I should be using PHP sessions and ajax?

Is it possible to view how many PHP sessions are open and access the variables from a separate session. Or should I be thinking of a completely different way around this?

Thanks in advance.

[criterion9]

If you moved session management in a db you could easily identify all active sessions using a simple query.

[coldscooter]

Thanks for the response. How would I clear out the db of dropped sessions?

[criterion9]

If you use any number of db based session management scripts. If you don't want to get that involved you can just use an "active" table with userIDs and last action time. Then whenever you build your list of users that are online you mark inactive any row where the date is in the past by 5 minutes or whatever.

[coldscooter]

Thanks for the advice.