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I've been looking at Campfire by 37Signals and it looks like a great tool for collaboration between developers but we need something that can be deployed internally. Any good options out there?

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What specific features would you look for to make it programming related? –  Joppe Jun 24 '11 at 23:27
Syntax highlighting would be nice, maybe diffs of files as well. –  Abdullah Jibaly Jun 25 '11 at 1:38
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Teambox appears to have similar features. You can test it on the hosted version, then head to the github project for the source code and installation instructions.

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Campfire is a very specialized tool with specific features; I cannot remember seeing any open-source projects that mirrored that functionality, however there may be non-open-source options out there that could be deployed internally.

With WebSockets and Node.js it would be fairly easy to roll your own solution quite rapidly if there was a specific feature-set that you wanted.

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Thanks for the info, any good references you'd recommend? –  Abdullah Jibaly Jun 25 '11 at 3:34
There's a few approaches to building a real-time chat program. Node.js uses Google's V8 JavaScript engine to provide a foundation for building asynchronous applications, combine this with WebSocket's bidirectional capabilities and you could easily build a quite functional chat application that wouldn't bog down your server. Other popular alternatives for doing real-time chat applications like that include Erlang (steep learning curve but very powerful), Ruby 1.9.2 (with actors, not as steep of a learning curve), and Go (bit steeper than Ruby, but still pretty easy to work with). –  dirk Jun 26 '11 at 2:21
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The web apps provided by Atlassian can be installed on your own servers and have some collaboration features in their Confluence product. It also integrates with their bug-tracking/project management system called Jira.

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