General question for programmers...
 

How hard is it to program decent chat rooms and give each registered user has a small profile. I'm not familiar with programming at all so I was wondering if this would be a difficult task and/or if it would cost alot to have someone do this for me. Any input is appreciated, thanks.

It depends on what language you want it done in and what kind of traffic you are talking about. I have seen custom Java servlets go for $10k+ but plain ol' Perl or PHP go for less than $100.

Ya and I don't see why you couldn't just go with a php type deal that uses a db to store all the profile info. It really is the cheapest way to go I would think. It really depends like A&H said, on what you want.

The PHP/MySQL solution has started to become the standard. Programmed correctly PHP/MySQL scales just as easily as the Java Servlet solutions and is infinitely easier to hahahahaha. As with all programming projects keep it clean and object orienteed and it will succeed. No spaghetti coding!

If you go with PHP/MySQL ease of coding depends on the user base you expect to have. If it is not to large and usage isnt going to be extreme you can easily host the web server and the database server on the same machine. This works for 99% of all projects. If it is expected to be large on a magnitude that you might require several web servers and a seperate database server you should be more create. For example, maybe user profiles can be hosted on a NTFS, in xml files.

Best of luck and feel free to ask me more.

What if the traffic load was going to be somewhat heavy and constant and I wanted multiple (10-30) different chat rooms. I've seen chats on some websites that refresh every 5 seconds maybe but I would want these to be completely real time. What do you think? btw- thanks for the input.

That alos depends on your server as well. Code can be clean and fast but the server will still take a hit if those 15-30 chatrooms are maxed out as well.