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Just have a look at the features and the demo: AJAX Chat.
Although the demo only shows one channel you can have as many channels as you want.
The AJAX Chat PunBB integration version takes over the forum names as channel names as well as the access rights.
You could as well define your own custom list of channels as described in the AJAX Chat documentation linked on the project page.
To open the chat with a specific channel you can either use the channel name (e.g. http://example.org/path/to/chat/?channe … me_Channel) or the channel ID (e.g. http://example.org/path/to/chat/?channelID=123).

Probably though I wouldn't recommend this. What do you want to achieve?

Some new version releases have happened:

Version 0.5  (12.10.2007):
-------------------------------

New features:
- Realtime monitoring and server-side log viewer replaces log files creation.
- Invitation system to invite users to the current channel.
- Private channels based on invitation system.
- Possibility to access restricted channels by invitation.
- Possibility to use persistent font colors.
- Client-side settings are stored persistently in a settings cookie.
- /me and /describe and /action (new) messages are displayed in a custom style class.
- Added config variable to limit the number of available cannels.
- Added config variable to define the max users logged in.
- Added config variable to enable/disable private messages.
- Added config variable to enable/disable private channels.
- Added config variable to force auto-login.
- Added config variables to adjust guest usernames.
- Added config variable to enable/disable the display of channel messages login/logout, channel enter/leave.
- Added config variables to define the time of day and the days in the week the chat is opened.
- Styles from different chat versions are now included in all packages.
- Restructured CSS styles to separate Positioning, Borders, Fonts and Colors.
- Restructured DataBase code and added support for MySQLi.
- Chat versions with forum integration now use the existing database connection.
- Improved (multibyte) encoding support.

Bugfixes:
- Several (10) XMLHttpRequest objects are created for POST requests to allow real asynchronism.
This way messages sent before the server could respond don't result in an error message anymore.
- JavaScript links (private message links in online list) were not escaped properly.
- Removed Byte Order Mark at the beginning of finnish language files which caused unwanted output.
- Session handling now allows to keep the current session on logout.

Other changes:
- Code refactoring to cleanup the code and avoid naming collisions.
- Removed PHP Code from Template files - using a simple template system with custom tags.
- License change => Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike (still free and open source).

Changed files:
- all (all versions)

Version 0.5.0.1  (13.10.2007):
-------------------------------

Changes:
- Moved forum integration code out of class files and into lib/custom.php.

Changed files:
- index.php (all versions)
- lib/custom.php (all versions - new)
- lib/class/CustomChat.php (all versions except standalone)

Version 0.5.1  (14.10.2007):
-------------------------------

New features:
- Added simple flood control (two new config variables).

Bugfixes:
- Ignored userNames were not escaped properly for message filter query [SECURITY RISK].
- /roll messages were being displayed as user messages instead of chatBot messages (Code refactoring mistake).
- No display of invitations/uninvitations or /roll messages from ignored users.
- Preventing robots from being logged in automatically (phpBB3 version).

Changed files:
- lib/config.php (all versions)
- lib/class/AJAXChat.php (all versions)
- lib/class/CustomAJAXChat.php (phpBB3 version)

Wow, what a nice welcome.

Jérémie, you're right on the notion that HTTP is not the ideal protocol for a Chat.
In a perfect world we would all use Jabber anyway.

While not overcoming the limitations of a stateless protocol, the AJAX technology at least made it possible to implement a web chat that does not bring down the server.
At least this web chat is designed to do most of the work on client side. The language handling, the BBCode, Hyperlinks and Emoticons Replacement is all done by JavaScript on client side.

The data sent between client and server is as small as possible as well. Most of the Requests and Responses will look like this (without HTTP headers):

Request:

GET /chat/?ajax=true&lastID=20087 HTTP/1.1

Response:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><root><users><user role="0"><![CDATA[testing]]></user></users><messages></messages></root>

Sure, several chat clients pulling the server for data every 2 seconds does put a certain load on the server, but:
* The time between update calls can be configured with a configuration option - the default is 2 seconds.
* The operations the server has to do are not complex, the queries to the database held simple
* The data sent between client and server is as small as possible (see above).

In my opinion, a web chat is no replacement for a real chat protocol like IRC or Jabber, but it can be a nice to have if all you need is a browser to chat with the people on your forum.