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!
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 Pong Game, how to create a simple application, using standard chat messages to convey game state. We also learn about Client DISCO for discovering capabilities of a client connected to a chat server.
Chapter 9, Enhancing XMPPong with a Server Component and Custom Messages, explains how to develop a full-fledged XMPP demonstration application, including a server-side component, an XMPP-FTW extension that allows us to create our own messages, and clients that talk to the server using those messages.
Chapter 10, Real-World Deployment and XMPP Extensions, presents considerations for deploying your app, including security and scalability. These capabilities are described in XMPP Extension Protocols (XEPs), and in this chapter we also take the opportunity to introduce several additional XEPs that describe emerging XMPP features, including Internet of Things and WebRTC.
The requirements for all sections of this book after fairly minimal. Any computer built within the past five years that supports a recent version of Linux, Mac, or Windows will be sufficient. An up-to-date browser will be required for websocket support, but even then the project is able to fall back to standard HTTP. You machine should have at least 128 Mb of free RAM and the same amount of hard drive space.
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 know JavaScript and NodeJS. You will probably know JSON, and hopefully XML (this is the native output of XMPP).
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: First we'll install libicu and libexpat-dev.
A block of code is set as follows:
modules_enabled = {
"roster";
"saslauth";
"tls";
"dialback";
"disco";
"version";
"uptime";
"time";
"ping",
"register";
"posix";
"bosh";
};Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
$ curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/creationix/nvm/v0.32.0/install.sh | bash $ source ~/.bashrc $ nvm install 6 $ node -v
New terms and Important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "The shortcuts in this book are based on the Mac OS X 10.5+ scheme."
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