Hot on the heels of my post on why XMPP will be huge, here’s a ruby library to pre-initialize BOSH sessions in your Ruby web applications. This feature allows you to by-pass exposing your user’s XMPP credentials in your HTML views.


The process follows as such:

1. Start your XMPP server and create an account for your web application user.


2. In your Ruby application, use ruby_bosh to initialize a new BOSH session using the user’s xmpp username and password.


3. Pass the identifiers returned from ruby_bosh to your template engine as variables.


4. Bind the template variables to Javascript variables.


5. Use a Javascript-based BOSH connector (like Strophe) to attach to the pre-existing session using the identifiers.

There are many XMPP servers and BOSH connection managers out there, but as of now this library has only been tested with eJabberd 1.2+. Please feel free to fork and submit a pull request if you’d like to contribute.


The plugins and documentation can be found at: http://www.github.com/skyfallsin/ruby_bosh


Jack Moffit’s written a Django/Python example here.