Hmm. I already built something similar at chatfor.us
I used tornado load balanced by haproxy for the Web servers instead of Django. Backend is mongodb and I use a small tornado driven zeromq to manage passing updates between the front ends real time. That router also does all the db writes.
I built it in my spare time (and it shows) just to have a place to take twitter conversation to get around the 140 character limit
Not sure why you would need to seek funding to open source something like this. Today's frameworks make it pretty easy. Is there really enough need for another chat server? One motivation for me was to play with zeromq and tornado together. There are already other more robust and stable chat solutions out there. I never even considered there would be enough interest in it to open source my app.
Sounds interesting, though I wouldn't trust MongoDB with my (or anyone else's) data.
The problem is that, while building the core of this is easy-ish, the end result should be something very complete & easy to stand up. Our prototype functions (barely, mostly just due to a lack of time), but it's not polished or complete. It's not smooth, easy to use/administer & it doesn't include all the little details that go into successful software projects.
Gotcha, I guess I was thinking more along the lines of open source project than actual product. Based on the replies above I see where you're going now. Good luck.
Not sure if you're coming back to read this, but I'm curious about why django? Did you choose it because of your comfort level with it or are there advantages django offers for this kind of app? I built a few things with django a while back before I moved on to tornado for everything. Not because django was bad, tornado was just a better fit for what I've been building.
Partially due to familiarity, partially due to other projects. Django will be handling the standard webapp things (registration, serving archives, etc). To be clear, there will be a lot of plain Python code handling the other aspects, with a goal being that you could relatively easily replace the Django parts with your favorite tech stack (say Flask or Tornado). Smaller parts making a greater whole.
I used tornado load balanced by haproxy for the Web servers instead of Django. Backend is mongodb and I use a small tornado driven zeromq to manage passing updates between the front ends real time. That router also does all the db writes.
I built it in my spare time (and it shows) just to have a place to take twitter conversation to get around the 140 character limit
Not sure why you would need to seek funding to open source something like this. Today's frameworks make it pretty easy. Is there really enough need for another chat server? One motivation for me was to play with zeromq and tornado together. There are already other more robust and stable chat solutions out there. I never even considered there would be enough interest in it to open source my app.