An Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) Subprotocol for WebSocket
RFC 7395

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Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)                     L. Stout, Ed.
Request for Comments: 7395                                          &yet
Category: Standards Track                                     J. Moffitt
ISSN: 2070-1721                                                  Mozilla
                                                              E. Cestari
                                                        cstar industries
                                                            October 2014

  An Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) Subprotocol for
                               WebSocket

Abstract

   This document defines a binding for the Extensible Messaging and
   Presence Protocol (XMPP) over a WebSocket transport layer.  A
   WebSocket binding for XMPP provides higher performance than the
   current HTTP binding for XMPP.

Status of This Memo

   This is an Internet Standards Track document.

   This document is a product of the Internet Engineering Task Force
   (IETF).  It represents the consensus of the IETF community.  It has
   received public review and has been approved for publication by the
   Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG).  Further information on
   Internet Standards is available in Section 2 of RFC 5741.

   Information about the current status of this document, any errata,
   and how to provide feedback on it may be obtained at
   http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7395.

Copyright Notice

   Copyright (c) 2014 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
   document authors.  All rights reserved.

   This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
   Provisions Relating to IETF Documents
   (http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of
   publication of this document.  Please review these documents
   carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect
   to this document.  Code Components extracted from this document must
   include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of
   the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as
   described in the Simplified BSD License.

Stout, et al.                Standards Track                    [Page 1]
RFC 7395                   XMPP over WebSocket              October 2014

Table of Contents

   1. Introduction ....................................................2
   2. Terminology .....................................................3
   3. XMPP Subprotocol ................................................3
      3.1. Handshake ..................................................3
      3.2. WebSocket Messages .........................................4
      3.3. XMPP Framing ...............................................5
           3.3.1. Framed XML Stream ...................................5
           3.3.2. Framed Stream Namespace .............................5
           3.3.3. Stream Frames .......................................5
      3.4. Stream Initiation ..........................................6
      3.5. Stream Errors ..............................................7
      3.6. Closing the Connection .....................................7
           3.6.1. see-other-uri .......................................8
      3.7. Stream Restarts ............................................9
      3.8. Pings and Keepalives .......................................9
      3.9. Use of TLS .................................................9
      3.10. Stream Management ........................................10
   4. Discovering the WebSocket Connection Method ....................10
   5. IANA Considerations ............................................11
      5.1. WebSocket Subprotocol Name ................................11
      5.2. URN Sub-namespace .........................................11
   6. Security Considerations ........................................12
   7. References .....................................................14
      7.1. Normative References ......................................14
      7.2. Informative References ....................................14
   Appendix A. XML Schema ............................................16
   Acknowledgements ..................................................17
   Authors' Addresses ................................................18

1.  Introduction

   To date, applications using the Extensible Messaging and Presence
   Protocol (XMPP) (see [RFC6120] and [RFC6121]) on the Web have made
   use of Bidirectional-streams Over Synchronous HTTP (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] that have an impact on BOSH-based systems.

   In most circumstances, it would be much better to avoid tunneling
   XMPP over HTTP long-polled connections and instead use XMPP directly.