Hi Jack,

This is a wonderful book to get things done via XMPP (and I also have definitive guide). I started my first programming language 5 months ago and am a newbie. But I want to dive into the world of XMPP.

My limitations become apparent in Ch 3. I've spent few days on it, to no avail. I may need to stop reading unless I receive some helps.

As for now, here are the few issues:
1. http://register.jabber.org is temp. out of service. What to do from here? I prefer to use ejabberd but anything will also do.
2. page 42. last 2 lines said "through out this book, it is assumed that strophe.js file, as well as any Strophe plug-in files are placed under the scripts directory. I am not sure what it means. (probably I need to study something else before I continue this book from here, what books/resources/directions can you recommend?)
3. similarly, page 43 "once you've downloaded flXHR and uncompressed it, you can place the contents of the flensed-1.0/deploy directory into the scripts directory inside your application's directory." What does it mean?
4. a walk through guide in youtube by using window for chapter 3 would be helpful. The video for ejabberd is great!
5. page 53 " once you have a web server running or have uploaded your code to your favorite web host, you can point your browser to the URL for hello.html on that server and try to log in." I don't get it. walk through video for this will be great.

I understand most things you said there and they are clear and concise. But I feel the book has implicitly abstracted some essential info for a newbie like me and the issue can easily be dealt with. The target audience can be much broader if this issue is addressed.

Appreciate it!

Kev51

There a lot more other jabber servers you can use! ( Btw: http://register.jabber.org is available at the moment )

Just download strophe.js and put it into the folder named "scripts".
Have a look at books for basic ajax programming and the jQuery framework (or just read the appendix A)

I think you should start with

1. building a basic simple html website
2. enriching this site with Javascript
3. try some basic ajax-technices
4. get familiar with jQuery

That would be a good basis for starting with Jack's book.
So' lets have fun!

You can find a list of publicly available XMPP servers here:
http://xmpp.org/services/

Your web application will live in a collection of files on disk, and there will be some HTML page that is the entry point to it. For example, in Chapter 3, the hello.html file is where the application lives, and you'd access it at http://localhost/hello/hello.html for example. The code in hello.html expects to load the strophe.js file from the scripts subdirectory of the application's directory. So in this example, you'd create a "scripts" folder under the "hello" folder (which contains hello.html) and then place strophe.js in that scripts folder.

After you uncompress flXHR, it will create a directory called flensed-1.0. Under that is a directory called "deploy". Move all the files from this deploy directory to the same scripts directory mentioned above.


I really like your suggestion for a Chapter 3 walk through video. I'll start working on that soon!