XMPP always had a special place in our heart. It’s an amazing protocol which comes with presence, addressing, as well as PubSub baked in. It’s no surprise we’ve had an XMPP API since day 1 at Superfeedr.
Now, though, XMPP scares a lot of people because of it’s X part: it uses XML as its data schema. Knowing that, Lloyd, an extremely talented web developer invented a very elegant solution for people to discover XMPP without dealing with the XML at all, thru XMPP for the Web (XMPP-FTW).
XMPP-FTW
XMPP-FTW is actually a proxy XMPP client which converts all the XML into a json API. It sits between the XMPP server and any app which can consume JSON. It supports the code XMPP protocol as well as a bunch of other features, including Superfeedr.
The demo is quite helpful to understand exactly what is going on. You can perform calls and configure them. In the back, they’ll be converted by XMPP-FTW to regular XMPP stanzas. Similarly, incoming XMPP messages will be converted into javsacript events which your app can handle.
Superfeedr support
Recently, Lloyd added support for the Superfeedr API and it’s a great playground to get started. Here is a little HOW-TO that you can try in the demo app. (you could also run your own XMPP-FTW)
- Type
xmpp.login, in the ‘event name’ box. - Options should appear in the following grey box. Replace them with
{"jid": "demo@superfeedr.com","password": "demo"}. Hit ‘send’. - Quickly, you should see an incoming event indicating that you’re now connected to Superfeedr XMPP server!
- Type
xmpp.superfeedr.subscribe - Complete the option box with
{ "feed": "http://push-pub.appspot.com/feed"} - You should see a response indicating that you’re now subscribed to that feed. The response also includes its status, the last time we parsed the feed… etc
- In another browser tab, publish something new in that feed using this app.
- You should see the incoming notification in XMPP-FTW!
That’s that simple and you should quickly replace the example feed url with any feed url that you may be interested in susbcribing to.
Also, once you’ve played with XMPP-FTW a bit more, we stringly encourage you to look at XMPP in more details. It’s a very elegant protocol and federates by default (as opposed to many APIs out there).
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