Having spent a little time reading up about the XMPP protocol (and also taking notice how quite a few instant messaging providers are being bought out for a few billion dollars!) I decided I needed to do something similar; it would shore up my skill set further and if users really like it then even better so win win for me.

So initially I took a look at Tigase, what attracted me to it was that it was open source and the performance was good (they had conducted tests to prove it). I also had taken a look at Openfire at the time but discarded it because the general consensus was that Tigase had the better performance. Fast forward about a year and now Tigase is AGPL (meaning you need to also open source your code if you use it – even if it’s only provided over the Internet), so Openfire is really the only choice left (it’s Apache License. You could however obtain the old Tigase GPL code and use that.

But why choose one of these versus many others? Well these were the only two that had a complete implementation, used enterprise languages and had good documentation.

Over the next few weeks/months I’ll be trying to add more content to this blog.