Design And Implementation Of Mobile Message Applications Based On XMPP

With the development of the mobile Internet and its applications, mobile message applications are becoming more diverse than ever. Technologies for clients to pull messages from servers are mature, so the key issue for mobile message applications is to push messages from servers to clients. Since push messaging can effectively enhance subscribers’liveness, push messaging gradually becomes a common feature for each mobile Internet application.In this paper, a push messaging system with which messages could be pushed from servers to Android clients is designed and implemented. After extensive research, XMPP protocol is adopted for push messaging. On one hand, the push messaging server provides REST interfaces for other applications, on the other hand, the server maintains persistent XMPP connections with clients. How to design a push messaging protocol, how to support a large number of online users with one server and how to maintain persistent network connections with the server for clients are all discussed in detail. Those are key technologies for push messaging system.In this paper, XMPP protocol and the current push messaging systems are studied first. Then a push messaging application architecture based on XMPP is designed. Secondly, how to enhance the reliability of push messaging by extending XMPP is analyzed. Thirdly, the design and implementation of servers, including databases, REST interfaces and push messaging modules are illustratied. Then the design and implementation of the Android client applications are specified, user interface subsystem and communication subsystem of the Android application are both included. User interface subsystem provides interfaces for users to manage pushed messages. The communication subsystem maintaions network connections to servers by a background service of Android. In the end, the power and traffic consumptions, reliability and performance of the push messaging system are tested. The test results show that the push messaging application brought forward in this paper is useful.