XMPP: The Definitive Guide

In 1880, it took one or two years to get a message from London to Calcutta and receive a reply. You’d have to find a ship’s captain who was headed round the Cape of Good Hope, persuade him to take it, and hope for good weather. Then the person on the receiving end would have to do the same to get a letter back to you. Today, you can send a message almost as quickly as it comes to mind, via IM, microblogging, group chat, email, or the communication tool of your choice.

“What these technologies have in common is that interactions happen in close to real time. To make this possible, we need technologies for real-time communication,” observe Peter Saint-Andre, Kevin Smith, and Remko Troncon, authors of XMPP: The Definitive Guide. “Ideally such technologies would be open standards providing the real-time equivalent of HTTP, HTML, and the other building blocks of today’s Internet, because over the long term, open standards provide stronger security, greater extensibility, and the possibility for more innovation at the edges than do closed technologies.”

The Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) is just such an open technology for real-time interaction. This open technology for real-time communication is used in many diverse applications such as instant messaging, Voice over IP, real-time collaboration, social networking, microblogging, lightweight middleware, cloud computing, and more.

XMPP: The Definitive Guide walks you through the thought processes and design decisions involved in building a complete XMPP-enabled application, and adding real-time interfaces to existing applications. You’ll not only learn simple yet powerful XMPP tools, but you’ll also discover, through real-world developer stories, how common XMPP “building blocks” can help solve particular classes of problems.

With this book, you will:

• Learn the basics of XMPP technologies, including architectural issues, addressing, and communication primitives
• Understand the terminology of XMPP and learn about the wealth of XMPP servers, clients, and code libraries
• Become familiar with the XMPP concepts and services you need to solve common problems
• Construct a complete business application or real-time service with XMPP

Every day, more software developers and service providers are using XMPP for real-time applications, and with the help of XMPP: The Definitive Guide, you can, too.