Question

I have developed a dating website built on top of the Google App Engine, to which I would like to add instant messaging, and possibly/probably audio and video conferencing.

Given that the users on the website do not want to share their personal details or real contact information, I am handling all of the login information and sessions without assuming that the clients have (or even want) a google account ID or any other login that is associated with their real identity.

I would like to hear suggestions on how I could go about adding instant messaging to my website given that I cannot just directly access Google Talk or some other existing service.

Would it make sense to use XMPP for this, and if so will Google Talk or any other XMPP service provider allow me to register new user accounts without manual intervention (ie. after a user is registered on my site, automatically register them with the XMPP provider)? Or, if not, perhaps I can use a single google ID with Google Talk with a different resource identifier for each user ([e-mail]/user1, [e-mail]/user2, etc…), and send messages between the different resources? Could this work, and/or would having thousands of simultaneous connections to a single account get me banned from Google Talk?

Perhaps some kind of AJAX based solution might make more sense given the fact that users are already registered on my website, but are not registered for an XMPP service?

Any suggestions about how I might approach this problem would be greatly appreciated.

Kind Regards
-Alexander

Answer 1

Text chat is the easier problem. You can do either with or without XMPP. Without XMPP, you’ll be building a Facebook chat type client on your pages that sends messages from each user to the app, and the app then shows then on the recipient’s screen.(The client can be polling, or use comet when it comes out). Check out olark to see how this works.

Once you build code to use the app as a switchboard that routes the correct message to the correct person (anonymously, maybe), you can port this easily to XMPP if you require. Both parties add [e-mail] to their buddy lists, and you send all messages from [e-mail] to [e-mail] and vice-versa. (assuming a heterogeneous site.)

Audio and video, I have no clue how to do without sharing details between the parties :-/