Hi,

As it seems many people are having problems with flHR. Also it's something that requires flash plugin being installed on computer. I think this is pretty much against the spirit/philosophy behind the book. I wanted to start learning things on this book and start to create something, but now noticing that any person who is going to use the site I create, need to have Flash plugin installed?

Really, is this necessary? Flash itself is giving problems to people. If not now, maybe from the next version that will be installed. How about creating something cross-platform, maybe even mobile applications. Flash is not simply available nor people willing to install it at all.

I wouldn't call flash an open technology. It's proprietary. It requires something proprietary being installed on your computer. That should be mentioned in the book!

Sorry for being too offensive, this was just a big show-stopper for me. I think it's been also show-stopper for google who is in process of changing youtube videos to WebM.

Zico

There is a simple misunderstanding here. Flash is not required at all. I have built several companies worth of technology using XMPP without using any Flash at all.

The flash plugin exists to help newcomers circumvent a very specific and common problem, which is that the cross-origin security policies of browsers make it extremely hard to get started since you would need to know how to run a web server and how to set up reverse proxies. (This is explained in the book as well in one of the last chapters on advanced techniques).

Another alternative, which I was unfortunately aware of before I finished the book, is the Cross Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) support that is built into modern browsers. This lets cross-origin requests happen with just a few header changes in the connection manager.

Strophe still needs support for CORS on IE7/8 (6 unfortunately is not possible), but for other browsers this already works now. ejabberd, Tigase, and punjab all support CORS out of the box now I believe, and Openfire is likely not far behind.

Note that almost all the traffic on this message board (and to my personal email account) is related to cross-domain errors. Even with all these helpful ways around the issue, it is still preventing most people from getting started. I fear it would be even worse if I hadn't made the flxhr plugin for the readers of the book.