Introducing XMPP-FTW
Around the autumn of 2012, as the real-time web was really starting to become an important area, members of the XMPP developer community recognized that developer teams were generating a lot of their own proprietary message setups but, more importantly, were making the same mistakes that had already been solved in XMPP over a decade earlier. The problem is that web developers simply saw XMPP and immediately sought simpler solutions.
Most of the issues arose from having to work with XML. It is not a format that is familiar to most web-developers; developers simply had bad experiences with it (remember SOAP?) or WebSockets were not available and BOSH just seemed slow and cumbersome.
The solution was to deliver an alternative interface to XMPP. Naturally, for the Web, this was JSON over a WebSocket. On the surface, this appears to be an easy goal since many people think, incorrectly, that you can cleanly translate back and forth between XML and JSON. Sadly, all existing attempts...
