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December 20, 2006
IM: Presence Service is up and running.
The IM presence web service is up and running.
To use this, you'll have to actually add yourself to your buddy list - at present, we're not allowing arbitrary presence information to be seen, only to users on your roster. If you add yourself to your roster it'll work.
Here's what you need to embed into your web page. Replace NetworkID with your network ID.
<a href="xmpp:NetworkID@im.case.edu">
<img src="http://im.case.edu/plugins/presence/status?jid=NetworkID@
im.case.edu&req_jid=NetworkID@im.case.edu&type=image" width=32 height=32 />
</a>
<br>
<a href="xmpp:NetworkID@im.case.edu">
<object type="text/html" data="http://im.case.edu/plugins/presence/status?jid=NetworkID@im.case.edu&req_jid=NetworkID@im.case.edu&type=text">
<p>
Unable to contact Presence Service
</p>
</object>
</a>
Here's what it should look like:
I've probably got the image size set a little big, but you can certainly change it. "Offline" also seems to show up as "null" for some unknown reason. I'll have to look into that.
Update (8/21/2007) - I've fixed all of the code in this entry so that it all works correctly with our current setup.
Posted by sdh7 at 05:23 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 18, 2006
Case IM Beta update
We're making good progress with the IM beta so far. Here are some notes on the current status of the service:
1. SRV records - Hopefully, we'll soon have SRV records in DNS. This will improve server-to-server traffic, as there are some Jabber servers(supposedly this includes GTalk(?)) that are known to not try s2s to servers that don't publish XMPP SRV records.
2. Domain name - Right now, the JIDs issued to users are of the form "NetworkID@messenger.case.edu" - I'm wondering if changing it to "NetworkID@case.edu" would be better? This would require a little bit of work - as then the SRV record would move from being a nice addition to being required, and any instances of "messenger.case.edu" in the database would have to be changed.
3. Web Services - At some point, we'll hopefully be making a web-based IM "presence" service available. This would allow users to embed an image or text on a web page (such as a blog indicating their current IM status.
4. Web-based IM - I'm still thinking about deploying some kind of web client for the service. The most likely choice is currently Claros Chat. I'd love to know if there are any good alternatives out there.
One other thing that I haven't mentioned before - the IM server is available to Alumni and anyone else with a valid Network ID, so check it out.
Posted by sdh7 at 01:34 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
December 13, 2006
messenger.case.edu progress
We've made a few changes to messenger.case.edu in the last few hours. We did the DNS and virtual IP address magic necessary to let us use ports 5222/5223 instead of the alternate ports we were using earlier. In fact, there shouldn't be anything listening on the old ports anymore, so don't use them.
Also, if you've been trying it out already, but can't connect now, you may need to flush your DNS cache.
Posted by sdh7 at 04:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 11, 2006
Wildfire IM public beta
In my last post I mentioned that we're looking for users to try out our test deployment of the Wildfire IM server. Well, now I'm going to make the details public.
You can point your Jabber client to messenger.case.edu, port 5222 (yeah, it's a nonstandard XMPP port... When this goes to production, it'll be the normal 5222). If you don't have a Jabbber client, you can try Jive's open-source Spark. If for some reason your client can't do TLS, you can do the "old style" SSL encryption on port 5223.
Server-to-Server XMPP is enabled, so you should be able to IM Google Talk and other Jabber users. We've also got the IM gateway plugin enabled, which will allow you to connect to AIM, Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, and IRC to some extent from your Jabber client.
update: All the connection details in this post are now correct, since the port move happened on Wednesday.
Posted by sdh7 at 03:28 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 08, 2006
Wildfire and Spark IM
We've been doing some testing of Jive Software's open-source Wildfire IM server and Spark IM client. We're pretty impressed with what we've seen so far. It does federated XMPP pretty much right out of the box, and there's a plugin that allows gatewaying to other IM services (AIM, MSN, Yahoo, etc.). Now, it currently doesn't have voice chat like Oracle RTC does, but Jive has indicated that a libjingle-based implementation is coming, and support for using Asterisk to implement voice is already out there and integration with Cisco's CallManager 5 may be possible too.
Also, we're looking for people who may want to beta test this - if you're interested, comment here, send me an e-mail, or heck, Meebo Me from the front page of my blog.
I'm also looking at Claros Chat as a kind of web-based IM client. Is there any interest in this? Or perhaps there are other alternatives out there?
Update: Since implementing the new IM system, I've discontinued my MeeboMe widget in favor of Wildfire's Presence plugin and an XMPP URL.
Posted by sdh7 at 11:47 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack