XMPP with Flex
DIGG IT!
Published
Saturday, September 02, 2006
at
11:59 AM
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Nick Velloff ported the XIFF XMPP library to AS3, great work Nick! I have this hidden love for XMPP/Jabber, I know its irrational but I fell for Jabber in 2001. When Flash 5 shipped, I worked with the original Jabber team to get Null byte support into the base Jabber presence server long before XMPP was an acronym. I then spent 2 years building a very large scale Jabber project which unfortunately never saw the light of day (grumble,grumble). On the project we built a Jabber cluster on FreeBSD that scaled to 50K concurrent users. I have always believed that Presence + Flash Player is one of the best combinations of technology. On Apollo, presence addition has the ability to be a killer app. XMPP supports so many features/extensibility in the base protocol. My favorite XMPP feature is called OOB(Out Of Band ) that allows you to append extensible data into a message packet. Clients that can understand the OOB packet digest it, otherwise it is ignored by standard Jabber clients. When building custom applications on Jabber protocols, OOB is essential. It allows your custom client to send information that others cannot see or understand. Say you wanted to send a form to a user via IM, with OOB you just add the form data into an OOB message within an IM. The user will get the message and the custom client can expose the form as an attachment (attachments for IM, cool!). Once you have the ability to create a custom client, you begin to look at Presence very differently. Everyone thinks about Presence as an IM client but when you can make clients easily, you can support so much more.
On the project I worked on we wrote 3 custom clients. 1 was the main application called Intratainment, the second was a Bot called Fred (he moderated chat rooms in AS1 ), and the third was a client for our database. See all three of these application could talk to one another freely via OOB messaging. If you needed to add or query the DB, you tested if it had presence, then you would send it an OOB IM message and it would return a message. It is weird to think about a Database as having presence but indeed it does. Custom clients for Jabber are a great thing.
I cannot wait to dive into XMPP again with AS3. Nick, please contact me at tpatrick@adobe.com!
Great work Nick!
Cheers,
Ted :)