XMPP IoT Anti-Patterns

geekplace.eu

5 points·ge0rg··4 comments

I'm still not sure I understand the reason they used XMPP in the first place.

Maybe because it scales far better than HTTP polling, and there are ready-made libraries for many platforms?

XMPP is not just an IM protocol, it's also usable (and used) for machine-to-machine communication...

I was thinking in terms of something that would fit better in with UDP, for example. A custom HTTP server can scale really well, there's also websockets, raw sockets and a host of other protocols that can use anything from bson, json, protocol buffers, etc.. that would be much lighter than XMPP, in a use case that would mostly be customized data loads.

I wouldn't want to run an alarm system over UDP, which provides none of the reliability guarantees of TCP, so I'd have to implement it myself.

XMPP classically runs over raw TCP, but can also run over HTTP, and there's a newish proposal for XMPP-over-websocket.

Protobuf, bson, json, etc. are all good building blocks that nonetheless require you to reinvent message/framing semantics. Why not use a premade protocol that already has that figured out, like XMPP, or AQMP, or MQTT?

The vendor in the example had the right idea by picking a protocol designed for this kind of thing, instead of trying to roll their own. They could've used it better (hence the blog post), ie. more idiomatically and over TLS.

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