Introduction

Even though you can connect to public XMPP servers on the conversejs.org website, Converse.js is not really meant to be a “Software-as-a-service” (SaaS) webchat.

Instead, its goal is to provide the means for website owners to add a tightly integrated instant messaging service to their own sites.

As a website owner, you are expected to host Converse.js yourself, and to do some legwork to properly configure and integrate it into your site.

The benefit in doing this, is that your users have a much more streamlined and integrated webchat experience and that you have control over the data. The latter being a requirement for many sites dealing with sensitive information.

You’ll need to set up your own XMPP server and in order to have Session Support (i.e. single-signon functionality whereby users are authenticated once and stay logged in to XMPP upon page reload) you will also have to add some server-side code.

The What you will need section has more information on all these requirements.

What you will need

An XMPP/Jabber server

Converse.js implements XMPP as its messaging protocol, and therefore needs to connect to an XMPP/Jabber server (Jabber is really just a synonym for XMPP).

You can connect to public XMPP servers like jabber.org but if you want to have Session Support you’ll have to set up your own XMPP server.

You can find a list of public XMPP servers/providers on xmpp.net and a list of servers that you can set up yourself on xmpp.org.

Connection Manager

Your website and Converse.js use HTTP as protocol to communicate with the webserver. HTTP connections are stateless and usually shortlived.

XMPP on the other hand, is the protocol that enables instant messaging, and its connections are stateful and usually longer.

To enable a web application like Converse.js to communicate with an XMPP server, we need a proxy in the middle that can act as a bridge between the two protocols.

This is the job of a connection manager. A connection manager can be either a standalone application or part of an XMPP server. ejabberd for example, includes a connection manager (but you have to enable it).

The demo on the Converse.js homepage uses a a connection manager located at https://bind.opkode.im. This connection manager is for testing purposes only, please don’t use it in production.

Overcoming cross-domain request restrictions

The domain of the Converse.js demo is conversejs.org, but the domain of the connection manager is opkode.im. HTTP requests are made by Converse.js to the connection manager via XmlHttpRequests (XHR). Until recently, it was not possible to make such requests to a different domain than the one currently being served (to prevent XSS attacks).

Luckily there is now a standard called CORS (Cross-origin resource sharing), which enables exactly that. Modern browsers support CORS, but there are problems with Internet Explorer < 10.

IE 8 and 9 partially support CORS via a proprietary implementation called XDomainRequest. There is a Strophe.js plugin which you can use to enable support for XDomainRequest when it is present.

In IE < 8, there is no support for CORS.

If you need to support these browsers, you can add a front-end proxy in Apache/Nginx which serves the connection manager under the same domain as your website. This will remove the need for any cross-domain XHR support.

Server-side authentication

Session Support

It’s possible to enable single-site login, whereby users already authenticated in your website will also automatically be logged in on the chat server, but this will require custom code on your server.

Jack Moffitt has a great blogpost about this and even provides an example Django application to demonstrate it.

Quickstart (to get a demo up and running)

When you download a specific release of Converse.js, say for example version 0.3, there will be two minified files inside the zip file.

For version 0.3 they will be:

• converse.0.3.min.js
• converse.0.3.min.css

You can include these two files in your website via the script and link tags:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen" href="converse.0.3.min.css">
<script src="converse.0.3.min.js"></script>

The index.html file inside the Converse.js folder serves as a nice usable example of this.

These minified files provide the same demo-like functionality as is available on the conversejs.org website. Useful for testing or demoing, but not very practical.

You’ll most likely want to implement some kind of single-signon solution for your website, where users authenticate once in your website and then stay logged into their XMPP session upon page reload.

For more info on this, read Session Support.

You might also want to have more fine-grained control of what gets included in the minified Javascript file. Read Configuration and Minification for more info on how to do that.

Configuration

The included minified JS and CSS files can be used for demoing or testing, but you’ll want to configure Converse.js to suit your needs before you deploy it on your website.

Converse.js is passed its configuration settings when you call its initialize method.

Please refer to the Configuration variables section below for info on all the available configuration settings.

After you have configured Converse.js, you’ll have to regenerate the minified JS file so that it will include the new settings. Please refer to the Minification section for more info on how to do this.

Configuration variables

animate

Default = True

Show animations, for example when opening and closing chat boxes.

auto_list_rooms

Default = False

If true, and the XMPP server on which the current user is logged in supports multi-user chat, then a list of rooms on that server will be fetched.

Not recommended for servers with lots of chat rooms.

For each room on the server a query is made to fetch further details (e.g. features, number of occupants etc.), so on servers with many rooms this option will create lots of extra connection traffic.

auto_subscribe

Default = False

If true, the user will automatically subscribe back to any contact requests.

bosh_service_url

Connections to an XMPP server depend on a BOSH connection manager which acts as a middle man between HTTP and XMPP.

See here for more information.

fullname

If you are using prebinding, you need to specify the fullname of the currently logged in user.

hide_muc_server

Default = False

Hide the server input field of the form inside the Room panel of the controlbox. Useful if you want to restrict users to a specific XMPP server of your choosing.

prebind

Default = False

Use this option when you want to attach to an existing XMPP connection that was already authenticated (usually on the backend before page load).

This is useful when you don’t want to render the login form on the chat control box with each page load.

When set to true, you’ll need to make sure that the onConnected method is called, and passed to it a Strophe connection object.

Besides requiring the back-end to authenticate you, you’ll also have to write a Javascript snippet to attach to the set up connection:

$.JSON({
    'url': 'mysite.com/xmpp-authenticate',
    'success': function (data) {
        connection = new Strophe.Connection(bosh_service_url);
        connection.attach(data.jid, data.sid, data.rid, converse.onConnected);
    }

The backend must authenticate for you, and then return a SID (session ID) and RID (Request ID), which you use when you attach to the connection.

xhr_user_search

Default = False

There are two ways to add users.

• The user inputs a valid JID (Jabber ID), and the user is added as a pending contact.
• The user inputs some text (for example part of a firstname or lastname), an XHR will be made to a backend, and a list of matches are returned. The user can then choose one of the matches to add as a contact.

This setting enables the second mechanism, otherwise by default the first will be used.

Minification

Minifying Javascript

We use require.js to keep track of Converse.js and its dependencies and to to bundle them together in a single minified file fit for deployment to a production site.

To use the require.js’s optimization tool, you’ll need Node and it’s package manager, NPM.

You can then install install require.js for Node like so:

npm install requirejs

The minified javascript file is then created like this:

r.js -o build.js

You should now have a new minified file (the name which is specified in build.js).

You can read more about require.js’s optimizer here.

Minifying CSS

CSS can be minimized with Yahoo’s yuicompressor tool:

yui-compressor --type=css converse.css -o converse.min.css

Translations

The gettext POT file located in ./locales/converse.pot is the template containing all translations and from which for each language an individual PO file is generated.

The POT file contains all translateable strings extracted from converse.js.

To make a user facing string translateable, wrap it in the double underscore helper function like so:

__('This string will be translated at runtime');

After adding the string, you’ll need to regenerate the POT file, like so:

make pot

You can then create or update the PO file for a specific language by doing the following:

msgmerge ./locales/af/LC_MESSAGES/converse.po ./locales/converse.pot -U

This PO file is then what gets translated.

If you’ve created a new PO file, please make sure to add the following attributes at the top of the file (under Content-Transfer-Encoding). They are required as configuration settings for Jed, the Javascript translations library that we’re using.

"domain: converse\n"
"lang: af\n",
"plural_forms: nplurals=2; plural=(n != 1);\n"

Unfortunately Jed cannot use the PO files directly. We have to generate from it a file in JSON format and then put that in a .js file for the specific language.

To generate JSON from a PO file, you’ll need po2json for node.js. Run the following command to install it (npm being the node.js package manager):

npm install po2json

You can then convert the translations into JSON format:

po2json locales/af/LC_MESSAGES/converse.po locales/af/LC_MESSAGES/converse.json

Now from converse.json paste the data as a value for the “locale_data” key in the object in the language’s .js file.

So, if you are for example translating into German (language code ‘de’), you’ll create or update the file ./locale/LC_MESSAGES/de.js with the following code:

(function (root, factory) {
    define("af", ['jed'], function () {
        return factory(new Jed({
            "domain": "converse",
            "locale_data": {
                // Paste the JSON data from converse.json here
            }
        })
    }
}(this, function (i18n) {
    return i18n;
}));

making sure to also paste the JSON data as value to the “locale_data” key.

Congratulations, you’ve now succesfully added your translations. Sorry for all those hoops you had to jump through.