Programming Goodness

Recently I've been in the mood to program some web applications after an extensive amount of time programming a "p2p" instant messenger. It doesn't work like most p2p applications though because it doesn't doesn't request other users through a tree. The way it works is through sending UDP packets to a certain port on a certain IP address to broadcast presence initially. This IP address is considered a group that a MulticastSocket listens on. Anyway, this is only used when a user first logs in to the messenger. For more information on how multicasting works go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicast for a great explanation. Anyway, after presence is sent once you are on the network then TCP connections are made when exchanging messages and other data. The protocol to send and receive presence and instant messages is a modified version of the XMPP protocol. It's kind of a watered down version because I just didn't really feel like adding all the bells and whistles that come with the XMPP protocol. Everything seems to work fine right now but I think I'm going to put that off and take a break from it.

Now I'm in the mood for some web application programming as I mentioned earlier and I think I know the perfect project. Since AJAX is the buzz word going on around the internet I took a look at some of my php scripts and decided to convert one of them over to using AJAX but I have to learn AJAX in parallel with converting my script. I'm hoping that it will not turn out to be a big pain in the ass but so far it looks like I will have to design the interface from scratch and hopefully nothing will have to change on the back end. Oh well... at least I'll learn quite a bit from AJAX and be able to add something else onto my resumé :). Wish me luck!