Practical XMPP

Lloyd Watkin, David Koelle

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781785287985
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Informatik
• Subtopic: Computernetzwerke

Unleash the power of XMPP in order to build exciting, real-time, federated applications based on open standards in a secure and highly scalable fashion

About This Book

• Learn about the fundamentals of XMPP and be able to work with the core functionality both server-side and in the browser
• Build a simple 1-to-1 chat (the "Hello World" of XMPP), explore multi-user chat, publish subscribe systems, and work with a decentralized social network
• Author Lloyd Watkins is a member of the XMPP standards committee

Who This Book Is For

If you want to learn about the fundamentals of XMPP, be able to work with the core functionality both server-side and in the browser then this book is for you.No knowledge of XMPP is required, or of TCP/IP networking. It's important that you already know how to build applications of some form, and are looking get a better understanding of how to implement XMPP for one or more of its many uses. You should be interested in the decentralized web, know HTML, and likely know JavaScript and NodeJS. You will probably know JSON, and hopefully XML (this is the native output of XMPP).

What You Will Learn

• Install and configure an XMPP server and use it to connect from a traditional desktop client and send a message
• Build a simple server-side application that will respond to messages from our logged in desktop client
• Install and run XMPP-FTW, connect to the server from the browser, and handle incoming/outgoing messages
• Connect to a multi-user chat room, send/receive stanzas, add a room password, join a protected room, set the room's subject, and change a user's affiliation
• Get to grips with the publish-subscribe extension of XMPP and use it to build a pusher system that can make any website real-time
• Build a simple XMPP component and create an extension for XMPP-FTW that allows you to use your own custom format
• Build an XMPP version of the classic game "Pong"

In Detail

XMPP (eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) is a messaging protocol that enables communication between two or more devices via the Internet.

With this book, developers will learn about the fundamentals of XMPP, be able to work with the core functionality both server-side and in the browser, as well as starting to explore several of the protocol extensions. You will not only have a solid grasp of XMPP and how it works, but will also be able to use the protocol to build real-world applications that utilize the power of XMPP. By the end of this book, you will know more about networking applications in general, and have a good understanding of how to extend XMPP, as well as using it in sample applications.

Style and approach

Through a number of hands-on projects, this book shows you how to build usable applications that highlights a feature of XMPP.

Practical XMPP

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Practical XMPP

Copyright © 2016 Packt Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author(s), nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.

Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.

First published: September 2016

Production reference: 1280916

Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.

Livery Place

35 Livery Street

Birmingham

B3 2PB, UK.

ISBN 978-1-78528-798-5

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Credits

Authors Lloyd Watkin David Koelle	Copy Editors Vikrant Phadke Safis Editing
Reviewers Emilien Kenler Ian Wild	Project Coordinator Nidhi Joshi
Commissioning Editor Edward Gordon	Proofreader Safis Editing
Acquisition Editor Reshma Raman	Indexer Aishwarya Gangawane
Content Development Editor Mayur Pawanikar	Production Coordinator Arvindkumar Gupta
Technical Editor Karan Thakkar

About the Authors

Lloyd Watkin has over 10 years of experience in building for the Web. A great believer in open source and open standards, he has contributed to, started, and led many successful open source projects and is also an international conference speaker.

Lloyd was knowingly introduced to XMPP in 2012 and hasn't looked back. Its open standard base and the ability to code clients, servers, components in any language leads to a very diverse and healthy environment. Its relevance only seems to increase as new technologies (not imagined at the time of creation) come into existence.

I would like to thank my family and friends for their support and damaged ear drums. I would also like to thank the XSF and the XMPP community as a whole for being supportive, welcoming, and always striving to improve and extend the XMPP ecosystem.

David Koelle is a principal software engineer at Charles River Analytics Inc. in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, where he has employed XMPP on projects to facilitate collaboration and shared situational awareness among distant teams. He is also the author of JFugue, a popular open source music programming API for Java and other JVM languages, and he is a co-organizer for the Boston Android Meetup.

David has delivered several award-winning talks at high-profile conferences including JavaOne and SXSW. In addition to his technical work in software engineering and systems engineering, he finds opportunities to mentor engineers to help them grow in their careers and recognize the value that proactive leadership can bring to engineers and their environments. David is a graduate of Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI).

About the Reviewers

Emilien Kenler, after working on small web projects, began focusing on game development in 2008 while he was in high school. Until 2011, he worked for different groups and specialized in system administration.

In 2011, he founded a company that sold Minecraft servers while studying Computer Science Engineering. He created a lightweight IaaS (https://github.com/HostYourCreeper/) based on new technologies such as Node.js and RabbitMQ.

Thereafter, he worked at TaDaweb as a system administrator, building its infrastructure and creating tools to manage deployments and monitoring.

In 2014, he began a new adventure at Wizcorp, Tokyo. The same year, Emilien graduated from the University of Technology of Compiègne, France.

Since 2016, he’s a systems engineer at Vesper, the company behind TableSolution, a leading restaurant reservation and CRM system.

Emilien has written MariaDB Essentials, Packt Publishing. He has also contributed as a reviewer on Learning Nagios 4, MariaDB High Performance, OpenVZ Essentials, Vagrant Virtual Development Environment Cookbook, Getting Started with MariaDB Second Edition and Mastering Redis, all by Packt Publishing.

Ian Wild's career has always focused primarily on communication and learning. Ian, a physicist by profession, spent 15 years in private industry designing communication systems software (Lucent Technologies, Avaya) before specializing in the development and deployment of learning management systems. Ian has a particular interest in the integration of legacy systems. He is currently the lead developer for Skills for Health, the sector skills council for the UK's health sector. He is responsible for one of the country's busiest online learning platforms (the National Skills Academy for Health).

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Preface

XMPP has been around since 1999, and in that time has been rediscovered several times over by generation after generation of programmers. Originally started to unify what was a massively fragmented instant messaging scene, XMPP has continued to show its relevance as new technologies and technology uses emerge.

We'll be making use of the Prosody XMPP server, a fast, resource light system written in LUA, as well as Node.js to write our own projects. The two main libraries we'll be using to interact with XMPP are node-xmpp on the server side and XMPP-FTW, a translation layer between XMPP’s XML messages and JSON, which is massively popular for use in the browser.

Through this book, you'll learn about the core concepts of XMPP, build basic clients that will allow you to interact with the XMPP ecosystem at large, build time-saving bots, and even build an entire custom application using XMPP standards and your own extensions.

The skills you'll learn in this book will allow you to create the next massively popular chat application built on the core standards, through to your own full-fledged Internet of Things (IoT) device that will collect, share, and respond to data from interconnected servers all over the world!

What this book covers

Chapter 1, An Introduction to XMPP and Installing Our First Server. Provides a brief introduction to the history of XMPP and its uses as well as installing and interacting with our first XMPP server.

Chapter 2, Diving into the Core XMPP Concepts, reveals that XMPP covers a vast number of areas but at its core is very simple and extensible. Here we learn about the core concepts so when we come to building our XMPP applications later we understand what's going on.

Chapter 3, Building a One-on-One Chat Bot - The "Hello World" of XMPP, show us how to build a simple chat bot and interact with it via a standard client.

Chapter 4, Talking XMPP in the Browser Using XMPP-FTW, we introduce XMPP-FTW and shows us how to build some basic functionality.

Chapter 5, Building a Multi-User Chat Application, how to create a very basic multi user chat client in the browser and begin chatting with our XMPP users.

Chapter 6, Make Your Static Website Real-Time, takes a standard static website and add real time data to it pushed via XMPP, making even the dullest website dynamic and exciting!

Chapter 7, Creating an XMPP Component, shows how to create our first server-side component, which let you develop business logic without modifying the server itself.

Chapter 8, Building a Basic XMPP-Based P...