Lace is not necessarily an Ajax chat room script (though in its current incarnation it is being demoed as one), or a chat server, or anything related to chatting or instant messaging. Lace is the application, or framework, that the demo chat room is built upon -- a simple, open communications framework. The idea behind Lace is to allow developers to easily create web applications that consistently and continuously share data between multiple clients over HTTP. Chat rooms, RSS readers, 'rich client' web applications, server to server communications and distributed services are just some of the possible uses of Lace.