HyBi Working Group L. Stout, Ed.
Internet-Draft &yet
Intended status: Standards Track J. Moffitt
Expires: November 19, 2013 E. Cestari
cstar industries
May 18, 2013
An XMPP Sub-protocol for WebSocket
draft-moffitt-xmpp-over-websocket-03
Abstract
This document defines a binding for the XMPP protocol over a
WebSocket transport layer. A WebSocket binding for XMPP provides
higher performance than the current HTTP binding for XMPP.
Status of This Memo
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Stout, et al. Expires November 19, 2013 [Page 1]
Internet-Draft XMPP over WebSocket May 2013
Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
2. Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
3. XMPP Sub-Protocol . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
3.1. Handshake . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
3.2. Messages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3.3. XMPP Stream Setup . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3.4. Stream Errors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3.5. Closing the Connection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
3.6. Stanzas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
3.7. Stream Restarts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
3.8. Pings and Keepalives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
3.9. Use of TLS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
3.10. Stream Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
4. Discovering Connection Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
5. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
6. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
7. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
1. Introduction
Applications using XMPP (see [RFC6120] and [RFC6121]) on the Web
currently make use of BOSH (see [XEP-0124] and [XEP-0206]), an XMPP
binding to HTTP. BOSH is based on the HTTP long polling technique,
and it suffers from high transport overhead compared to XMPP's native
binding to TCP. In addition, there are a number of other known
issues with long polling [RFC6202], which have an impact on BOSH-
based systems.
It would be much better in most circumstances to avoid tunneling XMPP
over HTTP long polled connections and instead use the XMPP protocol
directly. However, the APIs and sandbox that browsers have provided
do not allow this. The WebSocket protocol [RFC6455] now exists to
solve these kinds of problems. The WebSocket protocol is a bi-
directional protocol that provides a simple message-based framing
layer over raw sockets and allows for more robust and efficient
communication in web applications.
The WebSocket protocol enables two-way communication between a client
and a server, effectively emulating TCP at the application layer and
therefore overcoming many of the problems with existing long-polling
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