In my last article on this topic I brought a brief introduction into installing XMPP server Prosody on you Debian/Ubuntu based server. In this follow-up article I'll show you how to configure Bidirectional-streams Over Synchronous HTTP (BOSH) XMPP extension on Prosody XMPP server with the intention of creating XMPP powered web applications.
I've been working on my Ajax chat system Quick Chat for WordPress for a while now. With Quick Chat I'm using technique called long polling to turn Apache Web server into chat server. This approach works fine most of the time when there aren't many concurrent chat users and server load is moderate. The reason for this is that Apache Web server is tuned for serving HTML. Better way of handling chat on your page is to install dedicated chat server software using XMPP (Jabber) protocol. This is protocol is used by big players like Gogole as well as Facebook for their chat services. XMPP is open protocol with many open source server and client implementations. In this article I will show you how to install and configure Prosody XMPP (Jabber) server on Debian/Ubuntu Linux based operating systems.
Being a web master has its good sides, that's for sure. Messing with slow and unreliable FTP servers all the time isn't one of them. On the other side if you violate your hosters "holy" TOS (Terms of service) you will witness ultra fast shut down of your web page and in some cases wipe of your entire SQL database. What would you say about having testing server of your own? Wouldn't it be nice to test your PHP page locally on your Windows PC during construction and "FTP" it to the server of your choice once it's finished? Sure it would! You don't need Ph.D. in computer science to tune Apache, MySQL and PHP just the way you like it, or maybe even smarter to configure your local testing server the way your web page hosters server is configured. If you're interested, follow me...