Lace - Ajax Chat

Overview

Lace is a free chat application for your website. It takes advantatge of Ajax in modern browsers, and degrades gracefully in older browsers.

Lace doesn't care if you prefer Firefox or Lynx.

Fork It

The latest version of Lace is 0.1.5.1, released July 23, 2006.

You can fork Lace on GitHub.

A Brief History of Lace

Lace was one of my early experiments with JavaScript. Development started in late 2004 after I discovered the XMLHttpRequest API. My JavaScript skills were young, and libraries like YUI, Prototype and jQuery did not yet exist - or, I wasn't aware of them if they did.

A few months later, Jesse James Garrett coined the term heard 'round the (JavaScript) world: Ajax. It was around the same time that early Ajax bloggers like Brent Ashley picked up on Lace and started talking about it. Interest grew throughout 2005, and I spent a lot of my spare time hacking new features, fixing horrible bugs and building a small but growing community by setting up a forum and a blog. I was determined to build out and support this thing beyond simply a fun experiment.

Towards the end of 2005, Michael Mahemoff contacted me asking permission to use bits of Lace code as examples for his AjaxPatterns wiki, which he would be publishing in book form soon with O'Reilly as Ajax Design Patterns. Maybe the book idea was the impetus for the wiki, I don't really remember. I was too shocked to hear that some of my silly code was going to be published in book form, and lots and lots of people would see it.

Interest in Lace grew into 2006, but by that time Ajax had taken off in a big way and several JavaScript libraries had cropped up. Lots of people were doing awesome things with Ajax, including chat rooms, that put Lace to shame. I left the forums online for folks to get help, and tried my best to support Lace still, but development had basically stopped. My interests shifted as I changed jobs twice in 2006, and as much as I wanted to, or at least convinced myself I wanted to, continuing to develop and support Lace was simply not in the cards.

In 2007, I finally pulled the plug on the Lace forum, and left the simple homepage intact with links to a ZIP archive of the latest version. In 2009, I put the most recent version up on GitHub for posterity. In 2010, I pulled the plug on the Lace homepage, and redirected those requests to the page you're reading now.