Open Source XMPP for Cloud Services Matt Tucker, CTO Jive Software

Who am I? Member of the XMPP Standards Foundation and former chair of the board Behind Smack and Openfire at igniterealtime.org Keep giving talks about XMPP at OSCON…

In This Talk Brief XMPP and cloud computing overview Problems in cloud architectures; how XMPP can help Open Source tools Tips and tricks

XMPP (Jabber) Overview The open protocol for instant messaging (it’s fair to declare victory) IETF standard and a robust org developing the protocol: XMPP Standards Foundation Simple for developers and very deep Open Source toolset and heritage

XMPP Building Blocks DescriptionExample Presence Send presence data or manage presence subscriptions Giving a talk... Message Send data between users <message ’ > How's that presentation going? IQ Exchange information and perform queries using a request / response protocol. pdx type= ‘ result ’ id= ‘ 123 ’ > Not Raining!

What is Cloud Computing? Predominately based on web services (SOAP, REST, etc) Exploding in popularity – a critical trend of software architectures Started with simple services; now growing complex

Cloud Service Example: Salesforce.com Uses SOAP (not XML-RPC or REST) Huge percentage of traffic is polling for updates Introduced “Outbound Messaging” to cope with polling – but there are firewall issues

Cloud Architecture Problems Polling doesn’t scale and isn’t real-time Need two-way data exchange with easy firewall traversal Web services are feature poor (presence, binary data, etc) SOAP is what’s needed for complex services, but it’s overly complicated Thesis: web services are great for simple cloud services; XMPP is better for complex cloud services

XMPP vs. SOAP XMPPSOAP Performance Security Ease Innovative Features Ubiquity

XMPP Cloud Architecture

Open Source Tools: Server Openfire  Most popular XMPP server, with over 1 million downloads  In production with many cloud services  Massively scalable  Support for even strict firewall environments -- BOSH

Open Source Tools: Client APIs Dozens of libraries in every major programming language – start at jabber.org Java: Smack library from igniterealtime.org Flex: XIFF library from igniterealtime.org Javascript: JSJac, dojox.xmpp

Open Source Tools: Cloud Components Whack (Java) – simple and high level API Components use XEP-114 (easy)

ExternalWeatherComponent.java public class ExternalWeatherComponent { public static void main(String[] args) { ExternalComponentManager manager = new ExternalComponentManager("example.com", 5275); // Set the secret key for this component, for authentication manager.setSecretKey("weather", "test"); // Register this component to a subdomain of the server manager.addComponent("weather", new WeatherComponent()); //... Component will now start processing requests }

WeatherComponent.java public class WeatherComponent implements Component { public String getName() { return "US Weather"; } public void processPacket(Packet packet) { // Get the request packet here, parse it and return a reply } public void initialize(JID jid, ComponentManager componentManager) { } public void shutdown() { }

Example: Clearspace Doc Sharing

Example: Twitter Fire Hose Uses XMPP to provide access to all status updates, which would be impossible using web services polling Only provided to a small number of services (most recently Gnip)

Openfire Cloud Services: Tips and Tricks External components allow for hot-deploy of new or updated services Run on separate hardware for scalability Openfire allows components to connect multiple times for scalability and redundancy Epoll on Linux provides great performance Ad-hoc command available to listen for all traffic Use XMPP federation for federating cloud services

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