[SamWhited]

If you're making a service that's primarily chat, just use XMPP (disclaimer: I used to work for a large chat system based on XMPP and got involved with the protocol development when I did so). It scales very well (if it worked for Google Talk and HipChat…), but it does require that you understand the protocol. Network protocols have tons of subtle edge cases that will cause problems; inventing your own is just a bad idea, even if the existing ones require a bit more work to learn and get going with.

[jd007]

Did you guys write your own implementation or use an existing server?

[SamWhited]

We wrote our own server based on Python/Twisted (which has an XMPP implementation in Twisted Words). The Twisted implementation of XMPP is a bit outdated now, but it wasn't too terrible to work with. There may be more up to date libraries; in Python land aioxmpp seems nice.

[jd007]

Thanks for the info!