Professional XMPP Programming with JavaScript® and jQuery

Chapter 3. Saying Hello: The First Application

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Creating and organizing an XMPP project

• Making connections to XMPP servers

• Building and manipulating XMPP stanzas

• Sending data to the server

• Handling XMPP events

XMPP started as an open, federated protocol for instant messaging, but has become a powerful protocol for building many kinds of applications. The bulk of this book walks you through building various interesting applications as you explore the XMPP protocol and its numerous possibilities. These applications are all built with JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, and, though simple, show off how easy it is to make powerful programs with XMPP.

The first application you write is the XMPP equivalent of the famous "Hello, World" example. It sends a message to your XMPP server and displays the response. It sounds simple, and it is, but there is a lot to cover with setting up the user interface, getting the required libraries, and learning about the Strophe library.

By the end of this chapter, you'll be ready to start building much more interesting applications. By the end of the book, you'll have built some compelling projects that would have been difficult without XMPP.

This chapter may be one of the toughest in the book simply because it is filled with lots of things that will be brand new.

The applications in this book assume some knowledge of the jQuery library. If you are not yet familiar with jQuery, there is a brief tutorial in Appendix A.

APPLICATION PREVIEW

Before you ...