Eric Blue's Blog

In honor of its 10th year, I finally decided to officially retire the original LucidChat.com site. Lucid Chat hasn't been actively developed since 2000, and I figured it was time to focus on other projects. Although the site is still up (and probably will be for some time), I've put a memorial page in it's place. This is in part due to nostalgia's sake, since this required a tremendous amount of time and effort to bring to life. And, for historical purpose, since Lucid Chat was one of the first web-based chats of its kind when I launched it in '97.

Lucid Chat was the original reason why I started my first company Star Computing Solutions in early 1997 (at the tender age of 21). I eventually branched out into other areas (network consulting, software development, and web hosting). However, this proved to be a great business experience and showed me what was involved in starting and running your own company.

Here's an excerpt from the about page:

"Lucid Chat was one of the original web-based chat products in the mid-late '90s (Web 1.0). Many of the early web-based chat rooms were very rudimentary, and either used META refreshes (remember "screen flashing"?) to update and display user's comments, Java applets, or Netscape plugins.

What made Lucid Chat unique at that time was the ability to provide real-time text streaming through a web browser using a simple CGI interface. Many of the techniques used were the precursor to what is now referred to as AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML). "

AND

"For a period of time, Lucid Chat was sold and used on dozens of websites (a couple famous bands, record labels, movie sites, and large businesses). It was also featured in numerous reviews of chat products(most famously, ServerWatch) and compared against some of the most popular products of the day (iChat, ParaChat, ConferenceRoom, etc)."

I included commentary on the history, quotes, images, and credits.

Posted by EricB at 08:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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Over the years, I've used various techniques for maintaining state within
my web-based applications. Recently I started experimenting with
IFrames and decided to expand on these techniques and create a
JavaScript API. Enter JSMF....

JSMF (JavaScript State Management Framework) provides your
web-based applications with a comprehensive mechanism to maintain
state. This solution is made possible by utilizing frames (standard and
inline), forms, DHTML and an OO (object oriented) JavaScript API.
The API provides a standardized way to read, write, and persist
session data.

This project is hosted at:
http://eric-blue.com/projects/jsmf/

Posted by EricB at 06:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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Last week I stumbled upon a gem of a templating system. I accidently discovered ClearSilver as I was in the middle of developing a prototype web interface for a project at work. For years I've been looking for a C API that allows me to completely seperate my HTML content from my source code. Admittedly, I haven't looked *that* much since I rarely do web application development in C these days.

As far as templating systems and frameworks go, ClearSilver has many similar qualities to PHP, ASP, JSP, and a slew of home-brewed solutions (ala Template::Toolkit, etc). The interesting thing about ClearSilver is that it is sort of language agnostic, in the sense that there are hooks for Perl, C, Java, Ruby, and a few others. I managed to port my project in C within a couple hours, and am interested to experiment with some other languages. Admittedly, the documentation and samples were a little sparse, but I managed to put a simple parsing engine in place relatively quickly. So far, I'm pretty impressed with this project and will post more details as I experiment more in the future.

Posted by EricB at 11:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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