XMPP Bosh vs SignalR - xmpp

Does XMPP has more advantaces agains SignalR? They both using http long polling mechanism and I can not decide shall I use XMPP for my chat aplication or shall I use SignalR and keep everything ion my IIS server?

SignalR uses several transports see the explanation here How SignalR works internally?. Advantages of XMPP are the fact that greater number of other clients that just work out of the box (gchat, pidgin etc). But you could use both for your application if you wanted.

SignalR has a pile of ways for real time communication. WebSocket!! have you not heared about it? SignalR only use long pooling when nothing else is availabe on your old computer.

Related

How do I create bot user with webhook on server side in MongooseIM?

This is what I want
A user(bot) that always shows status Online
When a message comes for the user, I will hit a webhook associated with the user
The response from the webhook request will be sent as reply to the sender
This user will be able to intercept any message (let's say for profanity moderation)
This user will be able to send message to anyone (let's say broadcast)
This user will come in every users roster as default(like echo bot of skype)
I can't seem to find any resource on how to achieve this. I've found a way to intercept the incoming packet in openfire but I don't see any easy way to do this with MongooseIM. I haven't started diving deep into the source code yet, still looking for a way to do this without touching the source code and locking myself to a specific version of MongooseIM.
Disclaimer: I'm on the MongooseIM core team.
There are multiple ways this could be achieved. The easiest way to achieve this depends on your familiarity with Erlang, the programming language MongooseIM is written in.
You won't need any Erlang to use the event pusher module with its HTTP backend and the default settings, but you'd need some Erlang to control what messages get forwarded to the HTTP service or to make more complex setups. To send messages back, you'd either need to use the MongooseIM REST API or connect as an ordinary XMPP client to the server using one of the many XMPP libs available out there. This is probably the best approach to achieve your goal.
You can skip using the event pusher and just connect your bot as an XMPP client written in any language whatsoever. The bot might have your business logic within or can forward messages it gets to the HTTP service.
If you're comfortable working in Erlang, then the mechanism to extend the server is called Hooks and handlers and is described in the official MongooseIM documentation. This requires writing code in Erlang and building from source, but does not necessarily require modifying upstream MongooseIM code.
You could use the XMPP component protocol, which allows to extend the functionality of an XMPP server, yet structure it as multiple services. The components may be written in any technology you want and the most popular XMPP libraries should support the component protocol out of the box.
Depending on your choice from the above list and the language and environment you prefer, you might have to pick an XMPP library to use. There are XMPP libs available for iOS (ObjC and Swift), Android (Java and Kotlin), Python, JavaScript, C, and even some emerging ones for Rust, Dart and possibly more.

Raspberry Pi and Windows IoT

I am working on an automation project using Raspberry pi and Windows IoT. Is it possible to broadcast to a web page, similar to Server-Send-Event? I am monitoring certain events and instead of calling server every few seconds for updates, I would like server to send the alert to web page direct. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
I think you can use WebSockets. WebSockets are an advanced technology that makes it possible to open an interactive communication session between the user's browser and a server. You can refer to this sample. Or you can use IoTWeb to embed a simple HTTP and WebSocket server into your application.
Update:
WebSockets are a great addition to the HTTP protocol suite, but there are numerous situations where they cannot be used.
Some companies have firewalls that will prevent WebSockets from
working.
If you are deploying software in a shared hosting
environment, you may not be permitted to use WebSockets.
If you are
behind a reverse proxy that isn’t configured or the software doesn’t
support pass-through of WebSocket protocol, WebSockets won’t work.
Another option is long polling,the browser does an XHR request and the server simply doesn’t respond until it has something to send. But in this way, if you want to do 2-way communications with the server, you are effectively using 2 sockets. One is tied up hanging/waiting for the long poll response, and the other is sent by the client to send new information to the server. Long polling is also problematic because the client has to be able to handle XHR errors, some of which are tricky to handle or even impossible to handle. You can search more differences and disadvantages from internet.

Client server communication: REST vs Socket architecture

What are the advantages and disadvantages of using only socket based communication vs a hybrid of REST and socket (using socket only when bidirectional communication is necessary, like receiving messages in a chat).
When I say only socket, I mean that instead of sending a GET request asking for /entities, I'd send update_needed and the server would send a push via socket.
My question is not really about performance, it's more about the concept, like delegate vs block/lambda (using socket would be like the delegate concept and REST is more like block).
It all boils down to what type of application and level of scalability you have in mind.
WebSocket/REST: Client connections?
How to handle CQRS from a client-side perspective
Hard downsides of long polling?
The main reason why I wouldn't use WebSockets in any major project is simply that still many users don't use a modern browser that support them. Namely IE 8 and 9 don't support them and both together still have a market share of over 20 % (Oct 15).

Is it worth customizing an XMPP server? (vs. having client workers)

I've been asked about the possibilities for writing an ejabber module for an internal application. I am opposed to the idea, but I'm not sufficiently familiar with xmpp to support my response, and perhaps I'm wrong.
When google did wave they chose xmpp; and I understand that choice; real time communication between multiple people. Same goal here.
...but it feels to me like a customized server plugin isn't the right answer.
The issues I see are:
1) You lose sync with the server development and have to go through merge hell to ensure security updates, patches, etc. on the server are patched.
2) Any heavy customization of the server means you're probably expecting to be passing special mark up messages to interact with the server plugin; that means you'll have to do heavy client customization as well.
There is an alternative route:
Standard XMPP server. two customized xmpp clients; one for the client and one for the server.
The server client opens a connection to the XMPP server and sits and waits.
Multiple front end clients open connections to the XMPP server and then use xmpp to open connections optionally: 1) to each other and 2) to the server client user.
The front end can then perform real time updates by talking to the server client. It can even subscribe to multiple server client users and have incoming 'activity streams' for multiple different concurrent tasks.
This has the advantages of:
1) You only need to solve the XMPP problem once (client library)
2) Your application server is never externally visible; only the XMPP server is externally visible, which is massive security win.
3) You can use whatever XMPP server infrastructure you want without any issue.
4) You will never have a server update that causes your application server to become 'legacy' and unable to use those apis any more (short of a complete XMPP protocol update).
Downside:
You application server client needs to be complicated enough to handle multiple requests, or have multiple workers or something (but this scales using resource fields and have multiple application servers from different machines connecting to the XMPP network).
...but, I'm not that familiar with the technology.
Is there any reason why the alternative I've suggested would be worse than a customized xmpp server?
XMPP is used in Google Wave/Wave in a Box only for Federation, i.e. only for server to server communications. This is in order to take advantage of existing XMPP capabilities like discovery protocol. The messages are transported in binary form between servers inside XMPP packets. The Web clients use WebSockets/Socket.IO to communicate with the server. Actually that was the reason to argue about developing an alternative pure HTTP based Federation protocol.

HTML 5 web sockets and XMPP Server dialog

Does using web sockets actually mean browsers will be able communicate with xmpp servers (any other IM servers) directly ?
Thx.
No. Allowing TCP-level access to arbitrary servers would cause all kinds of security problems. Imagine a website which caused every user to connect to an SMTP server and start sending spam emails… suddenly you have a massively distributed spam attack, especially if combined with an XSS attack on a major site. Web Sockets has a small amount of framing around it designed to make such attacks impossible, without adding too much overhead over TCP.
One day. It's likely that we'll define an XMPP sub-protocol for websockets that can replace BOSH(XEP-0124/0206) when both the client and server support it. In the meantime, BOSH is widely implemented.
you can think of HTTP polling ....
and transfer xmpp data along 8080 port..