WxLive show notes for July 27 2012

Andy Stapleton presented CCS ChatterBox a.k.a. Newsgroup Chatter, which addresses the shortcomings of the Skype chat and the existing newsgroups. This is a cloud-based solution, so an offline reader is also in the works. 

There are newsgroups and chat rooms, as well as advertising. There will be conference areas to focus on one specific subject and a way to allow advertising, but neither of these have been implemented yet.

Andy explained that in the Skype chat you establish a socket to everyone else in the chat; ChatterBox takes a similar approach. 

A number of newsgroups are already in place.

Contributions and collaboration are encouraged. Tell Andy what you'd like to see. The product will be open sourced for non-commercial use. 

Andy lost his connection at 22 minutes after the hour due to a random reboot, so Arnold filled in with some info on the upcoming conference November 7-11 in Nashville. 

Andy got back on track around six minutes later. He dove into the code, starting with the Postgres database schema. The newsmessage table has parent and child IDs, which Andy uses to display tree tables. He went into some detail on how to do tree displays. 

Just for the shock value, Andy showed that there are 12 (twelve!) classes so far in the code base (but he admitted that Pete Halsted wrote some  of these). 

Andy showed how he manages the software release process and deliver updates across the internet. He also talked about using the HTTP interface to the Microsoft translation service. 

You can download the app at www.ccscowboy.com/ccsnews/ccsnewschatter.exe.