I5 diploma student releases FLOSS Gateway for XMPP over WebSocket on github
Yesterday, I5 diploma student Christian Hocken and his advisor Dominik Renzel together released WXG, a gateway for XMPP over WebSocket, as FLOSS project on github.com
WXG (pronounce as "Wixig") is a Java-implementation of a gateway enabling communication with native XMPP servers over the WebSocket protocol and API, as specified in an early IETF draft (http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-moffitt-xmpp-over-websocket-00).
WXG is available on github as both source code and binary version: https://github.com/hocken/wxg
Until now, one of the common techniques for using XMPP in JS-powered Web applications was to make use of BOSH and XMPP over BOSH. However, with the advent of the WebSocket protocol and API already widely available in modern Web browsers, the unstable and slow BOSH technique should be replaced. Currently, only few servers are equipped with connectors for receiving and delivering stanzas over the WebSocket protocol, among them our LAS/MobSOS Server and the ejabberd XMPP server. For all those servers not yet equipped with XMPP over WebSocket connectors, WXG should be worth a try.
Clients in the context of the ROLE project are XMPP-enabled OpenSocial gadgets, the building blocks of ROLEs. With XMPP over WebSockets-enabled gadgets we can get rid of the comparably unstable, uncomfortable, and error-prone BOSH technique, which does not work for any widget running on a container not under our control (e.g. iGoogle). With a FLOSS solution for such a gateway, the way is paved for XMPP PubSub-based remote interwidget communication and any other extension protocol.
See The XMPP Experience for more details on WXG and other XMPP developments at I5.
