Summer of Code Progress

In the past 2 weeks, I have tried every server-side BOSH implementation I can find (although more are always finding me!), and all have their individual problems with my client...

Openfire
No support for XEP-0206, and hence no SASL login is possible. I also have the reproducible (yet still mysterious) problem I blogged about in my last post. I also have had problems with Openfire's overactivity detection. The XEP specifies that the client is always allowed to make a request if it is to send data. The old version of the XEP which Openfire implemented was not clear on this, and as far as I can tell I get disconnected when I should not be.

ejabberd
Well, it seems to work. Yet ejabberd does not support XEP-0206 either, and also refuses non-SASL logins. This makes it impossible to use with my code for now.

JabberHTTPBind (JHB)
A handy little servlet which implements XEP-0124 and a little bit of XEP-0206. Yet I have problems with this also, as it seems to take wait seconds before the session creation response is received. After that I get a reply, which triggers a reply from gloox, to which the server replies instantly (yes, it appears to be polling for some reason). This happens until I begin getting errors from Tomcat (I believe JHB disconnects the client for requesting too frequently). I suspect a bug in the logic for polling, which I will take a look at after implementing multiple connections.

Punjab
The problem with Punjab seems quite simple, yet I have been unable to solve it. All my testing so far is being done locally, and Punjab seems to try to resolve 'localhost' on the external DNS. I don't know Python well, so this is the best I can understand of the problem. I intend to speak with the Punjab developer(s) this week.


All of the above are problems I am having, I would not be surprised to learn that many of them are a problem within my code. Unfortunately not having a working server implementation makes it very hard to know where the source of any particular problem lies. If anyone has suggestions about issues I have listed above, please do contact me :)

Today I managed to talk with Ian Paterson (author of the XEPs), who will kindly allow me to test against his server. Also I spoke with the anonymous commenter on my last post who has been very helpful, and offered me their Python implementation to play with as well. I learnt this week that Tigase has BOSH support in-development. With luck I will be able to test against Tigase in the coming weeks.

This week I also began the biggest change in the code for a while - enabling multiple connections to be made to the connection manager. This will help the client to work through proxies which don't support/allow HTTP 1.1 and/or pipelining.