[jdev] Help choosing the right technology

[Kevin Smith]

Just to clear up a couple of things.

On Tue, Nov 13, 2012 at 7:12 AM, Michael Weibel
<michael.weibel+xmpp at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Push based communication.
> Besides ejabberd commercial, I don't know which servers implement this.

All XMPP servers provide 'push' communication. Presence and message
stanzas are push-based, iq are polling.

>> Guaranteed message delivery
> This is one of the most important things for mobile (as you might know already). There's XEP-184[1] for this and you have to watch out that your server implements this in order to know that the server really received this message.
> Besides this XEP there exist different implementations by some servers.

184 is client-to-client. XEP-0198 is the client-server one.

>> Scalability
> This entirely depends on the server and, more specifically on your use case. You might want to do load tests using e.g. Tsung[2].

Picking an arbitrary load testing tool is unlikely to result in useful
data. The best thing is to quickly knock together a tool that
simulates the type of traffic you'll be generating.

But yes, some XMPP servers scale well.

>> Machine to Machine communication
> What do you mean with this? XMPP is a federated protocol, therefore S2S communication is builtin.

There's no problem writing non-human-driven XMPP clients. Just pick a
library and off you go. XMPP isn't a chat system at its core, it's a
way of routing snippets of data.

>> Mobile friendly
> XML is considered verbose. You can enable stream compression if the server supports it. On the last XMPP Summit they talked about XML->JSON translating which might help to reduce verbosity.

JSON/XML is pretty much a red herring here - to encode the same data
you're just switching <> for {}.

But XMPP stanzas aren't /that/ big before transmission, when you're
talking about working over phone networks. Yes, compression will help
with stanza size.

>> always on
> I don't know what you mean with this, can you elaborate?

You can open a connection and leave it open. Yes, this is the model
XMPP uses (as opposed to HTTP, which uses many requests over time).

>> Is XMPP good to build a Mobile app?
>
> Message reliability is very important (as said previously). Also you'll need an XMPP library which is robust. There's e.g. asmack[3] for Android and e.g. XMPPFramework[4] for iOS.

There are more choices than just these (and these may not be the best choices).

/K