Professional XMPP Programming with JavaScript® and jQuery

Chapter 14. Writing Strophe Plug-ins

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Using Strophe plug-ins

• Creating plug-ins

• Adding namespaces to Strophe

• Building a simple roster plug-in

The applications in this book were all written using Strophe's primitive functions to build and send XMPP stanzas. Developing the code this way provided valuable visibility into how the various extensions of XMPP work. In real applications, however, it is nice to develop some abstractions to reduce some of the grunt work. Strophe allows users to build and load plug-ins that extend its functionality so that such abstractions can be built by developers and used by applications.

As an example, recall that in Chapter 9 you built SketchCast, which broadcast drawing events to a pubsub node for subscribers to watch. The application's code created subscription stanzas, node creation stanzas, and configuration stanzas to accomplish its tasks. Imagine if there was a pubsub plug-in for Strophe that encapsulated this logic for you. Code using this plug-in might appear as follows:

SketchCast.connection.pubsub.create(
    SketchCast.node, SketchCast.created, SketchCast.create_error);

SketchCast.connection.pubsub.configure(
    SketchCast.node, {"max_items": 20},
    SketchCast.configured, SketchCast.configure_error);

This version of the code is no less correct, but much shorter and more clear. The details of how to build the various stanzas required for the operations are hidden behind the plug-in's interface, leaving you to think about your own application's ...