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> (or maybe even simpler, namely without xml?) I implemented a fair amount of XMPP for a web client back around 2012, and I gotta say, the XML wasn't a problem

> (or maybe even simpler, namely without xml?) I implemented a fair amount of XMPP for a web client back around 2012, and I gotta say, the XML wasn't a problem, at all. Actually the whole thing was a lot easier than comments about how awful XMPP is might lead one to expect—I know a lot of the complexity is in extensions, which I barely touched (but some!), but some people paint the whole protocol as unworkably bad, and that's simply not true. As for the XML side of it in particular, XML compresses well, isn't slow to write by hand with modern editor features, and working with it in a browser is great because—and maybe this isn't common knowledge?—you can tell the browser to build a DOM out of XML, not just html, so you can let it handle parsing and constructing or modifying messages, meaning you can get pretty damn far implementing XMPP with surprisingly few lines of code and no external libs.

MattJ100 4y ago
Indeed. I work with XMPP daily and share your views. However XML can be horrific, and I do dread working with it in many applications (remember SOAP?). I assume people transfer these experiences easily. One thing that can be annoying is that some environments don't have streaming ("SAX") parsers readily available. That's less of a problem these days, but framing would have helped implementers in that regard. However we do have XMPP-over-websocket defined these days (which doesn't have to be used only in a browser) and that has framing.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  > Indeed. I work with XMPP daily and share your views. However XML can be horrific, and I do dread working with it in many applications (remember SOAP?). I assume people transfer these experiences easily. Oh, sure, XML can be a nightmare, it was just good enough in XMPP's case that I doubt anything else would have been much easier/better. There were some minor annoyances and awkwardness, but that's hard to completely eliminate in that kind of thing. Its using XML wouldn't have made any list of notable challenges on that project, for sure. > However we do have XMPP-over-websocket defined these days (which doesn't have to be used only in a browser) and that has framing. Oh wow, nice. IIRC I used Comet(?), which was my only big client-side dependency, to talk to a very simple bridge I wrote (probably Nodejs?) and OpenFire for the daemon, solely because it was stupid-easy to write a custom auth class (it's Java) so it could share accounts with our broader product without needing to modify any other parts of the system. Having some of that—at least the HTTP-bridge portion—already covered would have made it even easier.
  - MattJ100 4y ago
    Since you mentioned comet, one of my favourite solutions for sending realtime stuff to web browsers is Server-Sent Events. It's just so simple. I wrote an XMPP bridge for it at: https://modules.prosody.im/mod_pubsub_eventsource https://modules.prosody.im/mod_pubsub_eventsource Of course if you need bidirectional (and not REST) then you generally need to upgrade to websockets.

MattJ100 4y ago

Indeed. I work with XMPP daily and share your views. However XML can be horrific, and I do dread working with it in many applications (remember SOAP?). I assume people transfer these experiences easily. One thing that can be annoying is that some environments don't have streaming ("SAX") parsers readily available. That's less of a problem these days, but framing would have helped implementers in that regard. However we do have XMPP-over-websocket defined these days (which doesn't have to be used only in a browser) and that has framing.

yamtaddle 4y ago
> Indeed. I work with XMPP daily and share your views. However XML can be horrific, and I do dread working with it in many applications (remember SOAP?). I assume people transfer these experiences easily. Oh, sure, XML can be a nightmare, it was just good enough in XMPP's case that I doubt anything else would have been much easier/better. There were some minor annoyances and awkwardness, but that's hard to completely eliminate in that kind of thing. Its using XML wouldn't have made any list of notable challenges on that project, for sure. > However we do have XMPP-over-websocket defined these days (which doesn't have to be used only in a browser) and that has framing. Oh wow, nice. IIRC I used Comet(?), which was my only big client-side dependency, to talk to a very simple bridge I wrote (probably Nodejs?) and OpenFire for the daemon, solely because it was stupid-easy to write a custom auth class (it's Java) so it could share accounts with our broader product without needing to modify any other parts of the system. Having some of that—at least the HTTP-bridge portion—already covered would have made it even easier.
- MattJ100 4y ago
  Since you mentioned comet, one of my favourite solutions for sending realtime stuff to web browsers is Server-Sent Events. It's just so simple. I wrote an XMPP bridge for it at: https://modules.prosody.im/mod_pubsub_eventsource https://modules.prosody.im/mod_pubsub_eventsource Of course if you need bidirectional (and not REST) then you generally need to upgrade to websockets.