Professional XMPP Programming with JavaScript® and jQuery

Chapter 5. Microblogging in Real Time: An Identica Client

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Using XMPP <message> stanzas

• Using the Identica XMPP API

• Improving messages with XHTML-IM

• Dealing with stored offline messages

Millions of users communicate with friends and the world on Twitter, Identica, Jaiku, and other microblogging services. These services ask users to answer a simple question: "What are you doing?" The resulting stream of users' updates is very similar to a dynamic, global chat room, where each user defines the room they see by the people they are interested in.

Like chat systems, microblogging systems typically have low latencies, facilitating real-time communication among participants. Unfortunately, this low-latency channel is hampered by traditional, high-latency user interfaces. Many power users of microblogging services interact with these systems using third-party clients that make the experience faster.

One such service, Identica, has full support for XMPP clients. In this chapter, you build a real-time microblogging client for the Identica system. You will start to see how XMPP-powered web applications result in a more dynamic, low-latency, real-time experience.

In the previous two chapters, you learned the basics of the Strophe library and built a simple application to facilitate experimentation and debugging. The fun stuff starts in this chapter, in which you make useful software using XMPP that would be challenging to create using other methods.

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