Chatting or instant messaging is a valuable for of communication, somewhere between email (very asynchronous) and telephone/Skype/VoiP/HangOut (synchronous) and quite similar to SMS. Unfortunately, there is has been an explosion in the number of IM protocols and services, many of which cannot talk to each other. Whatsapp is perhaps the most popular chat-like service, but it lives on its own. Google Talk (now assimilated into GMail and Google Hangouts) started as a relatively open service (based on the XMPP standard for IM), but is now largely proprietary. AOL, MSN, ICQ, Facebook, Skype, Twitter – many different largely closed networks within in which users can interact in char-style. But unfortunately hardly across which. Not like emails for example that float freely between domains, servers and vendor technologies.
Having said all that, XMPP is still supported by many tools and servers – and it is still used by large numbers of users. Not just for chatting, but for other types of push-style interaction. See this Slideshare presentation for a nice intro into XMPP. Note that it mentions some attempts to create gateways to connect the worlds of XMPP, Skype, AOL/AIM, IRC.
The goal of this article is not to commiserate over XMPP. It is to show you how SOA Suite can be configured to participate in XMPP based conversations – for now only as a sender of messages (we will discuss inbound integration with XMPP in a later article). In SOA Suite 12c, the functionality that was already available from the UMS (User Messaging Service) and the UMS Adapter in SOA Suite 11g has been continued and a little bit extended. I will show you what it looks like and how to make it to work.
