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Jabber + Punjab + JWChat = almost what I’m looking for

September 9th, 2005

A couple people commented on my project idea for instant messaging over HTTP. After looking at the open source IM market in more depth I’ve found that the pieces I was looking for are actually all there, mostly.

  • Jabberd 2 - an open source XMMP server implementation. There are also some great extensions (called transports) like PyAIM-t and PyMSNt that allow your server to interface with other IM providers. Any jabber server would probably do, but I liked the looks of Jabberd 2 best. Adopting an already existing IM server will save a bunch of time trying to design and write a backend for my project.
  • Punjab - an open source HTTP jabber client interface. Kind of like a session-intelligent proxy between the statelessness of the HTTP and the statefullness of XMMP. Version 0.6 is is the latest release, but it has a couple problems. I’ve had more success going with the latest code from CVS. Even that has some issues though, mostly that it does not implement JEP-0124 completely, and binding connections simply get turned into polling connections with a very fast (read instantaneous) polling rate. This problem is where I’m currently focusing my efforts.
  • JWChat - an open source browser based chat client. No ActiveX or Java required - 100% Javascript, which is native in all major browsers. Along with Apache on the server side to proxy requests to Punjab it works pretty well. Not really a fan of the appearance currently, but that is easy to change.

So, even though it appears nobody had really ventured into exactly the space I was thinking about, there are enough tools out there that I can pretty much construct my idea out of pre-existing code. Progress is being made, but it isn’t ready for public yet. Punjab seems to be the most important piece of the puzzle to me and it still has a couple show stopping bugs (but I think I know how to fix them - except for the scalability problems). Once I get it patched I’ll release the patches and a guide to build your own HTTP to Jabber to AIM/MSN/Y!/etc setup.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 9th, 2005 at 9/9/2005 7:00 pm and is filed under Computing, Technology.

9 Responses to “Jabber + Punjab + JWChat = almost what I’m looking for”

  1. mac Says:
    October 13th, 2005 at 10/13/2005 3:19 pm

    Why u are going to impl a new IM system?
    any good?

  2. Bobert Says:
    October 29th, 2005 at 10/29/2005 3:15 am

    I have been trying to set up something similar, have you made any more progress? First I tried just inserting IMs into an SQL database and check for new messages with xmlhttprequest, but then I switched to jabber. I have looked a little into the servers ejabberd and jive messenger, I think those are better than jabberd but I’m not sure which ones scales best, although ejabberd should have some clustering support.

  3. Ray Says:
    October 29th, 2005 at 10/29/2005 4:59 am

    Bobert,
    I have had some success. The 10/26/2005 18:34 CVS version of Punjab is working pretty well JWChat-1.0beta2. You could use JWChat and Punjab (or JabberHTTPBind if you wanted) on top of any Jabber server, ejabberd included. You can check out the installation I’ve got running at https://jabber.worrad.com/jwchat/. It still hasn’t been heavily tested and I only have an AIM transport installed, but you should be able to register an account and talk to other jabber or AIM users.

    Ray

  4. asllearner Says:
    January 14th, 2006 at 1/14/2006 10:21 am

    http://jaimy.us/
    http://www12.meebo.com/

  5. private road construction Says:
    March 27th, 2006 at 3/27/2006 2:35 am

    You should check out the PalTalk active X plugin that I have tested successfully with IE 6 & Netscape 8. It is available to premium paid room hosts. Give me a sec lemme grab the URL for my room and paste it here so you can check it out …
    http://groups.paltalk.com/pg/WebGroupJoinE.jsp?eid=170861335304318432013871912716914271&elw=20457746441613877009
    There you go if you click on the link it should take you to my room on PalTalk (after installing the active X plugin).

    Best

  6. ewind Says:
    May 23rd, 2006 at 5/23/2006 10:03 pm

    hi,Ray
    I want to install jwchat on windows 2003 with jabberd2,so what I need to do ?

    I do not want to use Apache.

  7. jil Says:
    June 13th, 2006 at 6/13/2006 3:48 am

    is it possible to implement ejabberd + punjab + JSJaC? I really need help on this. Thanks

  8. Prateek Says:
    November 10th, 2006 at 11/10/2006 1:52 pm

    Try the XMPP protocol the same thing that GTalk is using

  9. David Says:
    July 14th, 2008 at 7/14/2008 5:15 am

    Hi did you ever get this working? I tried out your version of jwchat. but is punjab actually working? I tried with out avail countless times?

    Let me know if you have any suggestions?

    Thanks

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