Using Jabber to send network messages

Question

(Also asked over on ServerFault, where I was advised to post it here too)

We have a requirement to send desktop alerts to various users (compliance, production) across a network when other users have submitted content online for a report.

At present we are using NET SEND but this has no guarantee of delivery and has proved unreliable from both client and server perspective (and I gather will be unsupported in later versions of Windows; we are currently running XP).

We are considering a Jabber-based solution but has anyone used a Jabber client to pop up alert messages on the screen like NET SEND does, as opposed to just bringing a chat window to the front or displaying a temporary 'toast' message near the system tray.

We need the alert message to be persistent and only dismissed by the user, indicating they have seen it. Toast-style pop-ups would be fine as long as it was not only for a limited time and again had to be dismissed by the user.

Any solutions?

Answer 1

Openfire is a java based Jabber server that seems to be targeted to a corporate/business environment and provides the "toast" message feature with their Spark client. They also offer several other useful business-focused features.

Answer 2

Offline message delivery is not guaranteed by XMPP specification. It depends on concrete server implementation. Moreover, it has cost in supporting user accounts. As an out-of-box solution it is fine, but since we are in development community, I would consider building alert system using MessageQueue for guaranteed delivery.

Answer 3

The message-delivery semantics of XMPP are liable to be a good fit for your application, since you're not talking about financial transactions that require fiduciary-level delivery guarantees. It will certainly be better than NET SEND by a lot.

Write a simple client that listens for messages and does the pop-ups in whatever format you want, and have the program run in the background, perhaps with a tray icon. Writing something like that with Jabber-Net would be the work of a few hours, for example.