Professional XMPP Programming
with JavaScript and jQuery
XMPP P owers a w I de range of a PPl I cat I ons including instant messaging, multi-user chat, voice
and video conferencing, collaborative spaces, real-time gaming, data synchronization, and even
search. Although XMPP started its life as an open, standardized alternative to proprietary instant
messaging systems like ICQ and AOL Instant Messenger, it has matured into an extremely robust
protocol for all kinds of exciting creations.
Facebook uses XMPP technology as part of its chat system. Google uses XMPP to power Google
Talk and its exciting new Google Wave protocol. Collecta has built a real-time search engine
based extensively on XMPP’s publish-subscribe system. Several web browsers are experimenting
with XMPP as the basis of their synchronization and sharing systems. Dozens of other companies
have XMPP-enabled their web applications to provide enhanced user experiences and real-time
interaction.
The core of XMPP is the exchange of small, structured chunks of information. Like HTTP, XMPP
is a client-server protocol, but it differs from HTTP by allowing either side to send data to the other
asynchronously. XMPP connections are long lived, and data is pushed instead of pulled.
Because of XMPP’s differences, it provides an excellent companion protocol to HTTP. XMPP-powered
web applications are to AJAX what AJAX was to the static web site; they are the next level of interactiv-
ity and dynamism. Where JavaScript and dynamic HTML have brought desktop application features to
the web browser, XMPP brings new communications possibilities to the Web.
XMPP has many common social web features built in, due to its instant messaging heritage.
Contact lists and subscriptions create social graphs, presence updates help users keep track of who
is doing what, and private messaging makes communication among users trivial. XMPP also has
nearly 300 extensions, providing a broad and useful range of tools on which to build sophisticated
applications. With only a handful of these, along with the core protocol, amazing things can be built
This book teaches you to harness the promise of XMPP in your own applications, enabling you to
build applications that are social, collaborative, real time, or all of the above. You will develop a
series of increasingly sophisticated XMPP applications, starting from “Hello, World!” and finishing
with a collaborative text editor, a shared sketch pad, and a real-time, multi-player game. By the end,
you will have all the tools you need to build the next generation of applications using XMPP or to
add new real-time, push, or social features to your current applications.
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