Instant Messaging, Kind Of
- By Matt Stephens
- April 4, 2006
For a long time, if you wanted to set up a message forum (a.k.a. bulletin board) on your website, you’d have to use a PHP-based product such as phpBB.
For Java fans, things are looking up though. Anyone wanting to integrate a message forum into their website could do worse than use the open-source mvnForum.
The nice thing is that it uses standard J2EE APIs (JSP 1.2/Servlet 2.3), so – coupled with the fact that you get the full source code – it’s nice and easy to integrate.
Features include the ability to send private messages, and the ability to send public messages to all members. As you’d imagine, you would want to be able to set up permissions so that not just anybody can broadcast their own public messages. Luckily, mvnForum’s permissions system is powerful and well thought out.
There’s also a search function, courtesy of the open-source (and ever useful) Lucene.