Not sure what you mean by Connection Manager so we could be using the same word with different meanings. Wildfire provides its own Connection Managers. Follow the previous link to learn what we refer by Connection Managers.
Moreover, we also have available a library that you can use to run your external components. The library is called Whack. There is no official release for it but we have been using it for our integration with Clearspace and it works great.
One thing you can try is downloading the Whack source code and see how it works. It even provides a weather external component as a sample.
If you are planning to have XMPP web clients then I would suggest checking for our super cool new Ajax library for XMPP. It will be released in February.