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I've been looking at some open-source XMPP servers, and am familiar with the official page http://xmpp.org/. But thus far I've not found anything in between "The Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) is an open technology for real-time communication" and a list of XEP specifications. For instance articles explaining the basics and terminology - stanzas, IQ, presence, etc, etc. Even the Wikipedia page misses this, unsurprisingly the open-source projects assume you know these things before you start digging into the code.
Is there a good, (semi-)official set of tutorials on this? Do I need to be looking for Jabber resources rather than XMPP?
Amongst other things, I'd hope to see diagrams for use-cases and flow, not just dry protocol text. I know books on XMPP exist, but generally anything in a book is available in some form online too.
This is probably way too basic, but at least it's technical: https://web.archive.org/web/20170916193014/http://www.adarshr.com/fun-with-xmpp-and-google-talk and the second part, https://web.archive.org/web/20171005104211/http://www.adarshr.com:80/fun-with-xmpp-and-google-talk-part-2
It explains what stanzas are, what types are available and stuff.
Here is what got me startet on XMPP Development:
A good book: XMPP The Definivie Guide
A mature Java API. I've chosen the Smack Library from Ignite Realtime and used the groovy language with a buch of small scripts to learn the basics.
Later i developed a plugin for the OpenFire XMPP Server. There are some tutorials and a forum on their site as well. I think that both the smack and the openfire api's are easy to learn.
If you are not into java: The book referes to the SkeekXMPP Python library and it uses it to create some examples (echo bot, ...).
As others have said, the specifications are a good introduction. It's true that they are technical in nature, and worded to be precise - but they are really some of the best specifications I've seen for any protocol, especially the latest RFCs (6120 and 6121) which clarify some of the grey areas in the originals.
E.g. you mention wanting to know the definition of a stanza, it's explained (with examples) in 6120 section 8.
If you have any feedback on how the specifications can be made clearer, then say so on the XMPP mailing list, where all feedback is considered for the next drafts of the specifications.
If the specifications are really too much for you (I appreciate some people like more pictures than I do), do consider the book (whether in paper or digital form) - it's designed exactly as an easy introduction to both the core specifications and the most common extensions, and written by people who help develop and implement them.
The RFCs (listed on the Wikipedia page) should be a quite good introduction to this topic.
For example: RFC3920: Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP): Core
This might be an old question, but I just wanted to keep the process I used in order to learn XMPP.
A few years ago, a few friends of mine and I were learning about how to leverage XMPP, and understanding how it fits into larger piece is quite a tedious task. I highly recommend starting off by reading the wikipedia page of XMPP:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMPP
You'll be surprised how many people aren't able to answer questions about XMPP which are the most fundamental.
I also highly recommend reading this article:
http://www.infoworld.com/article/2682116/application-development/xmpp-rises-to-face-simple-standard.html
It'll give you a sense of the motivation behind XMPP, it's history, and it's protocols that used to be on par with it.
From there, it'll be best to read the sources of the wikipedia page to give a more indept understanding of any features you might be interested in with XMPP.
Use the xmpp asmack library from
http://beem-project.com/projects/beem/files
download asmack-android-7-beem-jingle.jar
and documentation of
http://www.igniterealtime.org/downloads/index.jsp
Hope it helps others like it helped me
Install openfire on server side and use qsmack on android side.
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I'm a developer who is making an app without a graphic designer for the first time. I am competent at making user interfaces that fits conventions and the Apple Human Interface Guidelines, but when it comes adding that extra layer of decoration to make the app sexy, I'm totally inexperienced.
Does anyone have any pointers or resources for helping developers such as myself act like graphic designers, in particular for iPhone apps?
I have a technical knowledge of photoshop, without having an artistic ability with it. I like to believe that I have a good eye for judging aesthetics, but I've never been good at creating something aesthetically pleasing from scratch.
"Acting as" requires being one, so learn the basics of graphic design. One popular book for beginners is The Non-Designer's Design Book. It's not about Photoshop, it's about recognizing why a design works to improve your judgement. There is more logic behind it than you may think. Usually being pleasing is the same as conveying useful information, "design is how it works as much as how it looks".
Review screenshots of existing iOS apps: Pttrns, Well Placed Pixels, Beautiful Pixels, or keep your own collection using LittleSnapper and CandyBar.
Unfortunately most tutorials are step by step instructions to reach a goal, but they don't bother much in why or how combining certain effects works. Then there are a lot of subtleties which you will have to dig in blog posts. Erik Tjernlund posted a good link (flyosity.com), here is another (bjango.com). These details create immediate trust from the user. There are plenty of tutorial sites on Google, but learning PS is a long-term goal.
An (offtopic) option now is to buy professional services. Example, Articles from Sophia Teutschler got help from the IconFactory. It's cost effective to invest your time in what you do best to pay for what they do best.
I really like Mike Rundle's (#flyosity) blog post – "Crafting Subtle & Realistic User Interfaces" – as a good, hands-on introduction on how to think about creating beautiful user interfaces. Follow some of his advice and your apps will automatically look much better.
To get inspiration, I highly recommend the Pttrns site. Look at how different apps solve common tasks.
My last advice is to practice a lot. My experience is that using the most commonly used tools (Photoshop and Illustrator) doesn't come naturally for us developers. Seeing a professional using these tools can sometimes be a real eye-opener. Especially workflow and how they use the tools to guide them in the creative process.
I am frequently visiting this website: http://app.itize.us/wp/
Not for directly copying others design or functionality but I always get ideas on how to design GUI elements here, often by mixing many of the different styles. I will also recommend you to just play with all of the different layer options you get when you double-click a layer in Photoshop, learned a lot by doing that!
The Web Designers Guide to iOS Apps is excellent but it does focus on NimbleKit. If you're not using NK the design discussions are still valuable.
You can follow tutorials here. I am not vary much familiar about photoshop/illustrator but may be these tutorials be helpful.
Having a "good eye" and knowing what looks nice is good, but if you don't have that initial "vision" then you will be spending a lot of time playing around until you stumble on the design that looks good and even then you may never reach that point.
As developers, we are very good at following the guidelines put down by Apple and making sure that we follow those - after all it's a nice logical set of rules to follow and that's exactly what we do when we write code - follow logical rules.
Unfortunately the design side of things doesn't have rules that we can follow. Yes, we may be technical at using Photoshop or some other drawing application, but when it comes to actually having that spark of inspiration, that's not something we can just click a button for.
Looking at other applications is one way to go. But then you may end up having an app that looks like another app or a collection of a number of apps and then you may have problems with a fluid user interaction.
My own approach to this problem was to go out and find someone who is really good at doing that art stuff and working with them. I struggled for a long time designing my own stuff, but looking back, it was obvious it was a developer (me) doing the design. I'm not sure what it is, but there's an extra something that these graphic artists seem to be able to do that I just can't get and that makes all the difference.
But the flip side to this is that he can't code. Sometimes it's best to just stick to what you're best at.
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Which of these technology suite for Multi user online game project?
Project requirements:
Able to handle 2k-5k user at any given time.
client library for iphone and android (native, no javascript).
client library for Microsoft Windows (most important), also for mac os x and linux.
Good documentation specially for mod development
Project is not open-source. So, can only use libraries with suitable license.
I can program in erlang and java as well, programming language isn't an issue.
I was looking at following server technologies like Openfire, Tigase, ejabberd and RabbitMQ.
All are good for my project but I want to know more about what suite my needs, AMQP or XMPP.
What AMQP offer specially for real time online games. Is it better option then xmpp?
A key difference between XMPP and AMQP is binary content. AMQP handles binary data just fine, and XMPP seems more designed for XML. Personally for online games I use Google Protocol Buffers for message formatting and parsing, and with their very small binary footprint, I'd be more inclined to use AMQP to deliver those messages.
But do consider what AMQP server you want to use. I've been bitten by using RabbitMQ for my AMQP server in the past. RabbitMQ does not have any flow control facilities, at all. So if your clients are sending messages faster than your server can consume them, buffers on the server can fill up and blow the server up. More recent versions of RabbitMQ implement flow control in an exceedingly coarse way: they halt all consumers in the system until memory clears up.
I've never tried zeromq; perhaps it'd be better for the things I've been using RabbitMQ for...
5K users doesn't tell me much about their behaviour, but if they all submited one request within the same 10 second window then let's say you'd be looking in the 500-1000 requests per second.
I've had Active/MQ running on my relatively low-powered lap-top easily handling 300 requests per second and so I'd happily recommend it here. You can also set up clusters of brokers and achieve horizontal scalability. You can use an http protocol (STOMP) or its native binary protocol. Lots of client API libraries also for C/C++, Java, JavaScript and others. There is some initial AMQP support.
You didn't mention any persistence requirement, but again I would have thought that most RDBMSs would suffice. That said, some of the document oriented and big-table type databases look interesting from a horizontal scaling perspective.
I've also found Apache Camel highly performant and I strongly recommend it. Camel is used to implement your logic layer.
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When starting out on any project it could be seen as essential to pick an appropriate framework. I was wondering if you would point out any key questions that should be asked in order to aid the choice. I have looked at numerous sites and there doesn't seem to be any definative questions to ask before a choice is made.
I was wondering if, in any of your experience,s you have come across any key questions.
I gather one of the first is what are you developing? web app or desktop based
Any key questions would be a great help. This is a pretty general question as I am just looking for generic questions that would be asked before a choice is made.
Pick one you (or your team) already know.
Learning a new framework is a time consuming and expensive process that you don't want to be associated with a project. I would say the number one factor when selecting a framework/language is the existing knowledge base in your team.
[Obviously, this isn't very helpful if you don't currently know any, or the ones you do know aren't useful in the project's domain]
The best technology is the one you know. So ask a question - what technologies my team has experience in.
The main question you must ask is about stability. If you are developing an enterprise application wich sould be maintained for several years and should me stable, you should use mature and well tested frameworks. Something Java EE or .NET based for web applications. If your project is experimental, you can use experimental frameworks, technologies, languages etc.
Pick the one with good documentation. The quality of documentation gives you a clue how good the framework is.
A large user community is a plus, especially for opensource frameworks.
Ask yourself right from the start:
What are the things my application
will do, what are the ones it won't ever
do?
Choose a framework that makes it easy to accomplish the things you want from your application, care less for things that are extra. Don't worry, when you'll really need extra, you'll worry about looking then.
Who will use my application? What are
the numbers and needs of people that
will be the application's users?
You need a framework that scales well to the number of users you intend your app to handle and to their specific needs(collaboration, social interaction, ease of use, necessary tools, etc).
Is there a strong support
for the framework(from the developer or the community)?
Make sure you'll have who to turn to if you'll have questions or problems.
I usually try to find the framework that is the most popular. Have a look at a comparison of Javascript frameworks in Google Trends. It's pretty obvious that jQuery is the most popular by a large margin, so I'd lean towards using that.
It's not the only criteria, but more users means better documentation, testing, features, etc. Also, if you're new to an area of programming, then it usually pays to follow the wisdom of the crowd.
I would start by thinking about the pros and cons of frameworks in general. Based on those things that matter most in your situation, see which frameworks fit.
It's also helpful to think about the general features found in most frameworks of a platform (web application frameworks, for example). Decide which of those features are important to you, then investigate the frameworks that provide those features.
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I want to convert a website to use a Content Management System for updating a large number of content pages for a website. The current website is mostly ASP.NET, but I am considering converting to PHP if it means I will have better integration with the "CMS of choice" in the market. I have heard of Joomla! and other CMS' but I would like some answers to which ones are considered better. Features that I need to support are custom sidebar and tab menus (with expandable javascript drop downs for example). Can anyone tell me of a good solution?
You should look at opensourcecms.com. It's a site that hosts demos for the majority of open source CMS's out there in both PHP and ASP.NET. You can try each one out and read the features and reviews. It's a good way to find one that meets your needs without actually installing them.
Joomla and Drupal are your most common and popular PHP based CMS solutions.
On the .NET side I would suggest only DotNetNuke. The amount of development that goes on in that CMS is second to none and there is a huge marketplace for content, modules, themes, etc. There is pretty much everything available in DNN to meet your potential needs.
The "best" CMS really, really depends on your requirements.
I will say that Joomla is pretty much typical PHP spaghetti, and I hate it, but it might work for you.
Kentico (a .NET CMS) is a pretty decent one that I've deployed a few times. Microsoft CMS is supposed to be decent, I haven't tried it though.
Without knowing specifically your requirements, I find it impossible to give a solid recommendation, though.
I didn't work with these applications yet, but AFAIK TYPO3 and ezPublish (both PHP) are considered much more professional than e.g. Joomla.
Drupal has a long history, proven track record of success (many high profile use cases, including the Obama campaign, Mozilla Firefox, and MTV in the UK), and a boatload of free modules and themes so you can start somewhere good. Drupal is also highly customizable in terms of how data is stored in terms of content types. Drupal has excellent consulting and contracting help.
Joomla is a strong second, but a quick look at Joomla criticism on wikipedia, and I think the choice gets much clearer. Two out of the three criticisms of Drupal on wikipedia are that it's too complicated, which is really a subjective matter as compared to the shortcomings of Joomla.
If web development is a hobby for you, then use an open source CMS such as those mentioned. If it is your profession, consider working towards writing your own that meets your needs. The first few will likely be a little rough, but in the long run it can prove very fulfilling and must more customizable than anything off the shelf.
Writing your own also forces you to consistently expand your skills and learn the intricacies of the programming language.
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If you have worked with DotNetNuke, what are advantages and disadvantages that you have come across? What are alternative Content Management Systems that you have used that you find are better or worst. I'm trying to get a feel of what Content Management System Frameworks people are using and the advantages and disadvantages of them.
Thanks,
XaiSoft
This post may help as it has covered some of this info!
DotNetNuke works well, and has a wide variety of addins that are available for purchase from various vendors. It is also open source which is nice, as it allows you to troubleshoot issues to a deeper level then if it was closed source.
We didn't spend a lot of time researching CMS systems but this past summer we couldn't find anything with the functionality of DotNetNuke which targets the .net framework. If your not tied to .net then there are a ton of options available.
DNN is very very dynamic in terms of functionality, features and security. There's is nothing like it. However there are a few drawbacks that i felt while using it.
The biggest drawback in my opinion is the response time of a DNN using sites. The code itself is very obsolete and you need to lock yourself and scour on each and every coding details before using DNN. One more is the URL dependency, if you need to change your domain name to another your old database will be of no use.
There are a lot of new promising CMS extension in Dot NET market and Sageframe, in my opinion, is the best of them. I have been using this extension for quite a time now and I am quite fascinated by its features though still in beta.
DotNetNuke is quite powerful. It's biggest advantage is the inline editing of site content, in my opinion. It's biggest disadvantage is that it is pretty resource intensive compared to other CMS systems.
Here's a comparison I wrote last month:
http://www.logicalvue.com/blog/2009/01/cms-shootout-dotnetnuke-vs-joomla-vs-wordpress/
The biggest disadvantage is the missing support for multiple languages.
Yes, you can install multiple languages but you can't write seperate content for each installed language...
It's not hard to write such a module yourself but the other problem is the URLs.
You can use the 'Human Friendly' option but yet again, this does not support multiple languages.
For instance /Products/tabid/57/language/en-US/Default.aspx becomes products.aspx but there isn't a possibility to include the language like this /en-US/products.aspx
I know there are 3th party tools like UrlMaster which covers this up but still I think this should be available in such a framework.
The biggest advantage is the ease of developing your own modules! If a functionality isn't available, you can write your own module without any problems!
.Net Nuke is not good for developing projects.
Microsoft is releasing lot of versiond and including lot of lauguages.
So how developers will learn all the things...
This is very bad for developers.....