Backchat

Backchat is a JRuby-only gem that provides the Smack XMPP libraries and adds connection-pooling resources to them. It exists because there are no good native XMPP libraries for Ruby.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'backchat'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install backchat

Usage

You'll need to require all of the Smack libraries you need inside your app with the standard JRuby syntax:

java_import 'org.jivesoftware.smacmx.muc.MultiUserChat'
java_import 'org.jivesoftware.smacmx.Form'
...

But you'll get connection pooling for free. Yay! Inside your app, configure Backchat's pool in some kind of initializer:

Backchat::ConnectionPool.configure do
  host 'jabber.org'
  username 'admin'
  password 's3cr3t$@ren0fun'
  pool_size: 5 # five connections is the default
end

# configure also accepts a hash
Backchat::ConnectionPool.configure(host: 'jabber.org', username: 'admin',
  password: 's3cr3t$@ren0fun', pool_size: 5)

Once Backchat is configured, you can use the connection pool like magic:

# connection_pool takes a block and passes it an XMPPConnection.
Backchat.connection_pool do |conn|
  chat = MultiUserChat.new(conn, 'my-room@solonely.localhost')
  chat.create('me')
end

The connection pool is created on the first call to Backchat#connection_pool, provides authenticated connections, and blocks until a connection is available. In the future it seems like it'd be nice to have a group of unauthenticated connections so the pool could be used with multiple users, but my current use case doesn't require it so it's missing in this version.

Contributing

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request