hi all,

I have never done any network programming before, but i was hoping so set up some sort of server do handle what i hope to be an internet chatting site. I was hoping for people to have logins, and their status etc be able to be observed by an administrator.

Does anyone know of a good resource to use to set this up? I was hoping to write my own code to do this either in c/c++ or java. However, I have no idea what type of mechanisms are used or where information on them is found.

Also, is this sort fo think generally difficult or can it be hacked up pretty easily?

Is there a particular reason you want to do this on your own rather than use IRC (with presumably some web-based client)?

If you really want to program it yourself for some reason, then I guess my suggestion would still be the same; check out the code for IRC to get an idea on how to develop a client-server chat protocol.