I have a couple of Android and iOS native mobile application that I wrote which connect directly to an XMPP server that I host. They push and pull realtime data through XMPP. I also use some of the XMPP XEP extensions. For other operations, I have a django application running on the same server which all the mobile applications consume through an HTTP REST interface. I use Celery and Redis for the django side to do some operations asynchronously (like doing heavy batched writes to my db).
This all works fine and dandy. Yay.
But now I want to write a web front-end to all of this, so I started researching my options and well – there are so many ways to skin the cat that I wanted to check with the SO community first.
The idea to have a js library that gives me a unified API for socket communications (i.e try different implementations of web sockets or fall back to flash) appeals to me hence why I mention Socket IO. The idea of having to run a nodejs server, well, not so much (one more thing to learn), but if I have to, I definitely will. I know that some people use gevent as a replacement of the node server. Others, decide to write a small nodejs which they connect to the rest of their stack. I would probably do this.
Another option, is to use an js XMPP library like Strophe which I don’t think has a flash fallback. Also, I would need to research what this means for my server.
I have read several of the Stackoverflow answer on how to do comet and django – hence why it seems that there are several options.
The question is:
If I want to have the advantage of Socket IO behavior (with the fallbacks) and I want to push realtime data to the web client (which is being fed to the server through XMPP), and use Django what is my best option?
Update: The XMPP server that I use is ejabberd, which also supports BOSH. I realize that I could use Strophe.js and thus my communication would go over a type of long polling http connection instead of websockets. As far as I can tell, there are some XMPP over Websockets open source library, but AFAIK the community is not as active as the SocketIO one.
Update 2: Browsers that I need to support are only modern browsers. I guess this means that Flash fallback will not be that important, which is leaning me towards strophe.js.
Not sure why you’d need Flash fallback if you’re going to do BOSH (XEP-0124, XEP-0206), which is what strophe.js does. If you don’t need to support IE7, you can do CORS from strophe.js, and you don’t even need a proxy for same-origin. IE6 will work because it’s insecure, and IE8+ support a just-barely-working form of CORS.
To get information from django through XMPP to your client, make a component connection (XEP-0114) to your server using your favorite Python XMPP library, such as SleekXMPP from your Django app. Arrange for that connection to be relatively long-lived, for performance (i.e. don’t create a new one for each client connection). Send protocol as needed.
You didn’t mention what XMPP server you’re using. XMPP servers that don’t support BOSH are getting rare, but if you’ve got one, you might need Punjab as a BOSH-to-XMPP proxy, or you might want to switch to a newer server, such as Prosody.