CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-railsxmppchat
Jeet Sharma
Jeet Sharma

Reputation: 69

Design a chat client in a website. Shoud I use XMPP?

I am going to design a website using ruby on rails. And one of the features i want to implement is the chat functionality. Where users can chat with the other users/members of the website. What i should be using or in other words start learning in order to design something like that ?

Is XMPP the answer. if so, i would be glad if someone could be a bit descriptive on where to go from there and/or suggest some books. thanks !

I said XMPP because i know Facebook uses that and i plan to create something similar

Upvotes: 0

Views: 804

Answers (2)

deceze
deceze

Reputation: 522567

Protocols can become a pretty hairy topic, implementing a well-working protocol yourself can be pretty daunting without prior experience. Especially if it has to do with (near) real-time communication between several parties. If this is supposed to scale to any significant number of visitors, implementing this correctly can be pretty tough.

XMPP is a protocol that is already well established, is shaken down and already has many stable implementations. So when using it, you do not need to worry about designing or implementing the protocol anymore. For that reason, I'd really recommend it. It's also a rather easy to understand protocol, even if you will have to spend some time reading up on the basics in the beginning. Look neigh further than http://xmpp.org for documentation.

Setting up an XMPP server can be done in minutes, depending on your OS and the server you choose. The caveat is that if you want to customize the server at all, you will have to learn about the innards of it as well to some degree, which may or may not take some time.

The bottom line is: choosing XMPP and existing XMPP libraries and servers, you get 90% of the functionality for free and can concentrate on implementing your client. The question is, how much will you have to dig into the details of XMPP and the server, will this take longer than rolling your own protocol and will your own protocol suit your needs in the long term as well as XMPP would?

Upvotes: 3

Tigraine
Tigraine

Reputation: 23678

You always have to think about how much you want to spend on implementing this. If you go with XMPP you will be able to run a XMPP standard chat server (outside of Rails) and should be able to use a JavaScript Client with a XMPP to HTTP Bridge.

A project a quick Google Search brought up doing this is Strophe.

But I'd argue that you should think long and hard about if XMPP really suits your needs and if you really want to go through all that trouble for a Chat.

Implementing your own is also not straightforward, especially when you are writing all the long-polling and signaling stuff yourself. But it's not impossible and should give you a simple working solution in a couple of days.

Doing the chat yourself in Rails will require you however to use an alternative Database since Rails can't store data in-memory between requests and persisting chat data in ActiveRecord seems like not a very scalable and good idea.

Using XMPP obviously has the benefit of your users being able to connect to your Chat service using iChat, Jabber or any other XMPP Client..

Upvotes: 1

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