Book Image

Practical XMPP

By : Lloyd Watkin, Steven Watkin, Koelle
Book Image

Practical XMPP

By: Lloyd Watkin, Steven Watkin, Koelle

Overview of this book

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.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
1. An Introduction to XMPP and Installing Our First Server

Presence overloading

Seeing the extension of presence in the preceding lines, it might seem advantageous to start adding more information to presence stanzas and extending them further. For example, Marty McFly, who listens to a lot of music, might feel it appropriate to advertise what song he is listening to from his client.

While this is perfectly achievable with XMPP, it certainly isn't a good idea. Presence stanzas form a large proportion of traffic on the XMPP network, and filling in the stanzas with additional information will greatly increase the amount of information transferred on a regular basis. Additionally, other users with presence subscriptions to Marty may not be interested in this information, and therefore it would essential be useless data being transmitted.

If this is something you are interested in doing later on, then for this we have Personal Eventing Protocol or PEP (see XEP-0163).