Web chat using Strophe and Apache Vysper

I like Openfire, it is feature rich and mature, and open source. I just don’t understand why they would build their clustering support around a commercial product.

[It seems that the clustering plugin has an updated version that now depends on Shoal.]

That made me think a bit and I started looking for some other XMPP stack. I was told about Apache Vysper from a colleague at work and thought I’d give it a try. It is very much in development and lacks documentation, but it is very easy to get started. It does not have clustering support though, yet.

In this post I’ll replace Openfire in the web chat setup I did in a previous post. You’ll need a more feature-rich client than trophyim to add users to a roster (contact list) and such. I use Jitsi.

Setup Vysper

Grab a copy of Vysper version 0.7. Extract it to any folder. You’ll need a JVM to run the server. Before doing that, let us configure a few things by editing the config file spring-config.xml in the config folder.

Locate the following lines and change the domain name (your machine name should do fine or localhost):

<!-- TODO change domain name to your domain -->
<constructor-arg value="localhost"/>

Locate the following lines and change the admin user domain and password. Add more users if you wish.

<bean id="addUsers" class="org.apache.vysper.spring.AddUserHelper">
    <constructor-arg index="0">
        <map>
            <entry key="admin@localhost" value="passw0rd" />
            <entry key="friend@localhost" value="passw0rd" />

Uncomment the following line (thus enabling the BOSH):

<ref bean="boshEndpoint"/>

Uncomment the BOSH endpoint configuration:

<bean id="boshEndpoint" class="org.apache.vysper.xmpp.extension.xep0124.BoshEndpoint">
    <property name="accessControlAllowOrigin">
        <list><value>*</value></list>
    </property>
    <property name="port" value="8080" />
    <property name="contextPath" value="/bosh" />
</bean>

Start Vysper

Head to the command line and execute run.bat or run.sh from the bin folder. If all goes well you can access http://localhost:8080/bosh/ from the browser.

Execute trophyim

You’ll need to change the variable TROPHYIM_BOSH_SERVICE in the trophyim.js file, assign ‘http://localhost:8080/bosh/’. Open index.html in the browser (using a file:// url), that should launch trophyim. You can use a client like Jitsi to setup contacts, and then test chatting with them using trophyim.

Note that we do not require an http server and proxy, as in the previous post, I suspect Vysper supports W3C CORS out of the box. That is good news indeed.