psyced

psyced is a distributed chat and messaging system based on the Protocol for SYnchronous Conferencing. PSYC is multicast and routed between servers and clients in a scalable and efficient way, but users can also comfortably use IRC clients, telnet, Webchat, WAP or Jabber™ to enter the network.

psyced also communicates with the network of Jabber/XMPP servers and hosts programmable chatrooms for all of these technologies at once. It also provides gateways to several IRC networks, but unlike IRC, everyone can run a server and be an equal member of the PSYC network.

If you know IRC then imagine something that brings you all the features of IRC but none of its weaknesses, because technically PSYC is totally different from IRC.

psyced isn't just a PSYC server, it also simulates the functionality of PSYC clients allowing all sorts of dumb to very elaborate client applications to enter PSYCspace, from telnet over Java™ applets up to IRC, XMPP (Jabber™) and PSYC clients.

PSYCspace itself is much more like the web than like an IRC network: Every internet address can run its own PSYC server and become equal part of the PSYC network - No hierarchies, no privileges for administrators, except - of course - the privilege to decide upon rooms and people you are hosting on your own server. And should you misuse your powers, your friends will simply move on to a friendlier server - so you better be a good administrator.

Features

• PSYC and psyced are open-source (GPL)
• Connect using PSYC
• Connect using IRC clients
• Connect using XMPP/Jabber™ clients
• Connect using a java applet
• Connect using telnet
• Connect through other PSYC servers
• Connect via the outer XMPP/Jabber network
• Contains a simple HTTP-server, so that rooms can serve their history (x last lines of chat) and who is in them. Also, this server makes psyced a fine web application server, for blogs and boards and such. Probably the only one with completely natural multiuser support.
• All of the access protocols mentioned above are also available in their TLS/SSL encrypted variants.
• psyced provides many functions known from earlier chat systems and classic IRC clients, check out the psyced user manual for details.
• psyced is easy to adapt to your needs. No really. I mean it.
• Thanks to the other PSYC implementations it is possible to write amazing applications, gateways and clients in other programming languages that make use of the powers of psyced.

PSYC Multicasts

Taken and licensed from wikipedia:

The word "Multicast" is typically used to refer to IP Multicast, which is a protocol for efficiently sending to multiple receivers at the same time on TCP/IP networks, by use of a multicast address.

Unfortunately that technology doesn't work for chat and messaging in most cases. We are talking about multicast in its abstract meaning.

Multicast is the delivery of information to a group of destinations simultaneously using the most efficient strategy to deliver the messages over each link of the network only once and only create copies when the links to the destinations split. By comparison with multicast, conventional point-to-single-point delivery is called unicast. When unicast is used to deliver to several recipients, a copy of the data is sent from the sender to each recipient, resulting in inefficient and badly scalable duplication at the sending side.

This sounds so obvious, it is hard to believe only very few multicast technologies really exist. PSYC is a platform for experimenting with multicast algorithms today. It gives us a choice of tools which allow us to implement varying strategies of multicast from the classic IRC spanning tree over friendcasting, onion routing to full-fledged multipeer multicasting. In other words, we are taking care of distributing things smartly so that we're unlikely to run into scalability issues.

Status

.99 is the last release of a complete functional PSYC system before we finalize the PSYC protocol and release both protocol and server as 1.0. You may think that won't take long but I bet it will. Therefore, take PSYC as it is now and discover that it already does most of what you ever wanted in a chat and messaging system. If you're already using Jabber or IRC, you have nothing to lose, as you get to keep them.

• We're working on it this intensely, (just check the cvs diffs).
• We need more feedback, (beta-)testers, developers.

Also I should mention that psyced is often still referred to by its old name psycMUVE or MUVE.

Download psyced

Obtain psyced from our download page.

Resources

• How to use your IRC client with psyced
• How to use your Jabber™ client with it
• Read the White Paper to get the bigger picture on PSYC.
• http://about.psyc.eu