Creating a XMPP chat application with UDP or TCP with .net

Question

I am trying to create a chat application in .net but I am confused whether to use TCP or UDP.

There will be many users, each user need to send a message to the main server which will relay this message to the user. If the user is not online I would need to store the message for later sending.

Of course each message that I send needs to contain the message content, type and the user who wishes to deliver it. I was thinking about using XMPP as the transport layer for performing this.

The server needs to accept connections from many clients.

Each client needs to connect to the server, would they use the same port?

Answer 1

XMPP would be a good choice for your project.

Goto http://xmpp.org/xmpp-software/libraries/ and find a .NET library. All of them ship with sample code.

For your firsts tests you can either use a public server, your Gmail id or download and install one of the servers listed here: http://xmpp.org/xmpp-software/servers/

Answer 2

I've done this before with TCP and it was mostly straightforward. I used the same port for all the clients to connect, with the server listening on that port with a thread that served the clients in a queue and assigned their connections.

UDP works as well as TCP but involves extra work to ensure that your data is not lost randomly.

Answer 3

What about web sockets?