With the rise of XMPP and realtime technologies on the web, and the highly successful Realtime Conf, several of the staff at Surevine felt it was time for a regular meetup in the UK’s capital, London.
From this the XMPPUK meetup was born, sponsored naturally by Surevine who supplied the pizza and beer at the Mozilla offices.
The evening started with Owen Barnes talking about the latest version of SocketStream which is a great decoupled framework for building realtime single-page apps. Owen also showed us it was possible to use the same APIs on the server and client including a coding demo of this very impressive system.
Next up was Surevine’s Jonny Heavey talking about pinitto.me an open source, realtime, infinite, virtual corkboard application. Jonny demonstrated how easy it was to add realtime features to a site using node.js and socket.io and gave us a quick demo of the system with multiple participants.
Next up was myself (Lloyd Watkin) talking about my latest project xmpp-ftw. The aim of this is to make XMPP more accessible to web developers so that they can leverage the powerful features of XMPP instead of constantly reinventing the wheel with their own silo’d solutions. This is done by adding a translation layer between XML and JSON and named events to fill in the blanks.
The penultimate talk was from Paweł Ledwoń of Pusher talking about “when websockets aren’t an option”. Websockets are great but they can be unreliable for several reasons, Paweł took us through the reasons for this and a new client-side library for determining and using the best transport mechanism available.
To round off the event John Atherton the CTO at Surevine gave us an overview of the buddycloud project. Buddycloud is an open source federated social network built on top of XMPP. Recently the buddycloud team have rewritten the UI using a RESTful API endpoint and are now ploughing full steam ahead on their android client.
Slides from the talks are available on Slideshare.
We’ve set the date for the next event as 22nd May 2013 so please show your support by RSVPing on Lanyrd or Meetup. If you interested in giving a talk (in person or remotely) or there’s something that you’d like to find out more about please get in touch!
Keep up to date about the event on our Meetup.com, Facebook, and @xmppuk accounts. We also hope to have future talks recorded and online for the rest of the community.
Our thanks go out to Mozilla London for hosting the event!