War room Message center

Question

Looking for ideas on how to implement a kiosk style/full screen client that will display messages sent to it, in realtime or push based. Basically, think a 911 dispatch center call board. I was thinking a xmpp bot to display, and making a simple xmpp client that can only send messages to the bot.

This is for a very small emergency disaster agencies war room, and only needs to be able to display simple messages entered in from one of the computers in the building. Is XMPP a good solution for this?

Answer 1

An IM protocol like XMPP is an acceptable solution for this.

XMPP seems to fit the bill, it is mature and has many clients that support it so it would not be necessary to write a client, just set up a regular IM client to send to the "buddy" that is the big board.

Are you looking at the problem backwards? Describe what you want to do a little more THEN seek advice on protocols. It smells like you might be designing around a protocol rather than designing around your requirements.

Answer 2

This should be as simple as a single HTML page, running full screen, using Strophe.js and an XMPP account. Strophe is an easy-to-use XMPP library in Javascript.

Something like the basic.{html,js} example here should be pretty much what you want:
http://code.stanziq.com/cgit/strophe/strophejs/tree/

Answer 3

Sounds like a simple pubsub setup (XMPP will work for this) where the clients are all publishers and the War room is the only subscriber. This eliminates the need for rosters so it keeps the intial configuration pretty simple.

I don't know what language you prefer to use, but it would be rather simple in Smack using the pubsub API and any XMPP server you prefer that supports the pubsub extension. (You will need to build Smack from source though as that particular API is new and not in the release version yet.)