An XMPP Sub-protocol for WebSocket
draft-ietf-xmpp-websocket-00
XMPP Working Group L. Stout, Ed.
Internet-Draft &yet
Intended status: Standards Track J. Moffitt
Expires: March 09, 2014 Mozilla
E. Cestari
cstar industries
September 05, 2013
An XMPP Sub-protocol for WebSocket
draft-ietf-xmpp-websocket-00
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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This Internet-Draft will expire on March 09, 2014.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2013 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
document authors. All rights reserved.
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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 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
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 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
3.10. Stream Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
4. Discovering Connection Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
5. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
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.
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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
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