Freeish Time: Building A Real Time Chat Mobile App

With my innovation time, I wanted to build a real-time chat mobile app. Building on some research that a member of my team produced into how we could build our own chat server, I was keen to look into how mobile will interface with it, and build a small demo.

I was excited to use my innovation time for this as I felt it would be good to have the knowledge for any future live chat integrations Cube might be interested in. But also this gave me a really great chance to practice native development as I planned on doing this project as a native iOS app for learning purposes.

I decided to use xmpp., which is a communication protocol for message-oriented middleware and is made up of an agreed set of rules about how instant messaging should be implemented between devices. It covers everything from how messages are sent, to how contact lists should be structured, to read receipts. But the best bit is that it is extremely modular. You can see the ‘official’ definition below…

I definitely did a lot of learning this week! I have learnt how XMPP works from a mobile perspective and been able to evaluate its strengths and weaknesses, as well as learn the underlying terminology and architecture behind the protocol.

There were also challenges! Picking up native iOS code again after working on JavaScript projects for so long was a bit of a paradigm shift for me. It’s an entirely different workflow, so I definitely spent a big chunk of the first day or so refamiliarizing myself with Swift. This combined with the task of learning how XMPP works were, at times, a complete information overload!

However, going forward, I believe I can take what I’ve been working on and develop it into a framework for any future chat applications/integrations 3 Sided Cube might be interested in building.